Bots Vs Scambots: 2018 Cryptocurrency Arms Race

Since the existence of internet, there have been numerous scam bots reported, with the most notorious one being the infamous 419 Nigerian prince scam, which offered victims a large sum of money for covering the huge administration fees on international transfers for foreign dignitaries.

With the emergence of cryptocurrencies, it appears like automated scams are being developed by a new breed of criminals. Considering the anonymity nature of cryptocurrency transactions, tricks carried out in the crypt space are almost untraceable and hard to detect, especially when done is small amounts. The crypto scene has seen an estimated $670 million being lost to cryptocurrency scammers in Q1 of 2018 alone.

But how do they do it? Are there bots to fight them back?

People imagine that cryptocurrency scammers are very talented individuals employing serious skills and dark arts to execute their crime. The truth is that sometimes it’s easy to conduct their crime. One way they can do is though a phishing attack.

This is how it happens: a fake team member of a cryptocurrency project leads a victim to a cloned social media account or a normal site, where they get enticed to send their cryptos to a specific wallet address and in turn get a life-time limited offer or some kind of a bonus.

It’s hard for many victims to spot it, and assume their transaction was processed successfully, but when they don’t receive an acknowledgement email, that’s when it occurs on them that they could have been conned. Unfortunately, by that time their funds are long gone and cryptocurrency transactions cannot be reversed once initiated.

Scammers have now changed their ground, shifting to twitter, where they register cloned accounts that offer cryptocurrency or advice to followers of celebrity of high profile accounts. They are so meticulous that even Elon Musk praised the famous ‘mad skillz’, asking that “I want to know who is running the Ethereum scambots! Mad skillz”

Tweeter has obviously initiated some measures to combat these accounts, but it’s still struggling to keep on top of the many that are cropping up. It has forced some cryptocurrency influencers to change their Twitter handle to communicate to its followers. For instance, Vitalik Buterin changed his to ‘Vitalik “Not giving away ETH” Buterin.’

As scammers get clever with new strategies to target unsuspecting users, there are more sophisticated tools being developed in order to fight back the scam bots. One example of a platform doing this is AmaZix. The platform has bots working across various channels and projects, deleting content and banning users before they get to do their dirty job. Best thing is that, once an account is removed from one channel, it’s consequently removed from all others.

The need for a strong and reactive security bot came when Duo Security came to know that there was a network with at least 15,000 crypto scam bots on Twitter.

As cryptocurrency industry thrives, it’s common that crypto scam bots will increase with time. But with AI security systems, cryptocurrency communities can trust that enemy bots are identified and eradicated completely.

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