John McAfee, the bitcoin buccaneer, has grabbed the headlines again this week, but this time it is in a good cause rather than a self-serving one.
Earlier this week Ryan Smith at CCN revealed that a scammer was impersonating John McAfee on Medium. He wrote, “The so-called “McAfee Crypto Extravaganza” promises mouth-watering 10x returns — if and only if — you deposit a small amount of Bitcoin or Ethereum in the attacker’s wallet first.”
CCN alerted McAfee’s wife Janice to the scam and she posted on Twitter that it was a fraud. It was clear that the scammer had gone to some lengths to create two cleverly crafted phishing sites and the fraudulent pages even go so far as to fake Bitcoin transactions and mimic BTC block explorers.
It wasn’t long before John McAfee stepped up to add his view of the situation, and he took aim at Twitter for what he sees as its lax approach to bitcoin scams.
McAfee told CCN: “This happens three or four times a day where people pretending to be me on various platforms, attempt to scam people using a variety of scams. On my Twitter account everyone of my tweets are peppered with comments from people pretending to be me and attempting to get people to send Bitcoin or Ethereum in exchange for a larger amount. I no longer bother to report them to Twitter because I never get a response.”
You can understand his anger and frustration. As Ryan Smith commented, “Twitter has the paradoxical reputation of being both incredibly resourceful and annoyingly frustrating. Influencers find it increasingly difficult to wade through the information swamp only to interact with their genuine followers.”
And as CCN reveals, scammers will even use Pope Francis for an “Official BTC Giveaway”. Although, if anyone believes the Pope is giving away bitcoin, perhaps they also think that the moon is made of green cheese.
Over a year ago, Jack Dorsey, a big bitcoin supporter and one of the co-founders of Twitter, promised he’d take action to reduce the problem. But as CCN says, the problem seems to have got even worse. CNBC Crypto Trader host Ran Neuner recently challenged Jack Dorsey to stop wasting resources on a new user interface and do something to stop the exploitation of novice crypto users on Twitter.
Twitter may still be the leader in short form content, as Ryan Smith points out, but should another platform emerge that is scam-free, then Twitter may find its sizable community of crypto followers deserting it for a safer harbour.