Scammers have a new scheme to scam you on X (Twitter). They pose as legitimate accounts very simply, using a functionality provided by the social network.
All the tips are good for scam people online. One of them is particularly effective: take the appearance, or account, of someone legitimate. Sometimes, hacking an official profile allows the hacker to leave with a large sum of money, most often in bitcoin. Others choose to impersonate Elon Musk on TikTok or another social network. X (Twitter) is also affected by the phenomenon. Recently, some scammers have found a trick to pass yourself off as a known profile. No hacking needed, they just exploit a functionality of the platform.
When you post a message to X, the associated web address contains two main pieces of information. THE name of your account Then post ID (ID), namely a sequence of numbers. It is only the ID that is used by the social network to know what to display in the end. This means that anyone can create a URL with the name of a profile of their choice, while using the ID of a post that does not come from the mentioned profile. X will simply redirect to the correct address and change the name itself.
Scammers easily pose as legitimate profiles on X (Twitter)
Let’s take an example. The address https://twitter.com/phonandroid/status/1738106896777699464 appears to be a post from the official profile of Phonandroid. And yet, if you click on the link, you will arrive at a message fromElon Musk. We simply took the id of his tweet. This is how scammers do it, by creating addresses that, at first glance, come from accounts related to cryptocurrency (Binance, Ethereum Foundation, zkSync, Chainlink…). Except that they refer to accounts trying to scam you.
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Some even go as far as create fake profiles that look like the real ones to prevent you from noticing the deception in checking the forwarding address. This is the only way to be sure of the legitimacy of the link. X users on mobile must therefore be extra careful since the X application does not display a URL. The social network is unlikely to do anything about itsince redirection is a basic feature.
Source: BleepingComputer