Twitter begins locking accounts that impersonate celebs like Elon Musk or Bill Gates to help combat cryptocurrency giveaway scams using their names
To combat cryptocurrency scammers dropping deceptive links in Musk's replies — Twitter has implemented a new method for combating cryptocurrency scammers …
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2018, Twitter's scam problem lived in the replies: fraudsters posing as Elon Musk or Bill Gates dropped cryptocurrency giveaway links under the real celebrities' posts, and the platform's answer was to start locking the impersonation accounts outright. That was the opening move in a cat-and-mouse game that kept escalating.
Two years later, attackers stopped impersonating and started hijacking, taking over verified accounts for Bitcoin, Obama, Biden, Binance, Musk, Gates, Bezos, and Apple in a single coordinated crypto-scam breach. By late 2022, the same impersonation threat resurfaced through a new door when paid Blue checkmarks let fake celebrity accounts spread fake announcements before suspensions caught up.
First-order effects
- Scammers running giveaway schemes under Musk's and Gates' names lose their cheapest tool — lookalike accounts — forcing them back toward compromised or newly registered handles.
- Twitter's trust-and-safety load shifts from reactive takedowns to proactive locking, raising the bar for legitimate parody and fan accounts that now risk suspension by default.
Second-order effects
- Each enforcement round pushes attackers up the difficulty curve — from fake replies in 2018 to full account hijacks of high-profile verified users in 2020 — making employee access and credential security the new weak point rather than signup abuse.
- Celebrities like Musk become de facto victims whose brand equity funds the scam economy, giving them standing to demand platform-level identity controls they would later own directly.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward identity verification becoming Twitter's core structural problem: once impersonation is profitable enough, badges, locks, and suspensions are all stopgaps until ownership of the verification system itself changes — which is exactly what the 2022 paid-checkmark chaos exposed.
- If platforms keep trading free verification for revenue, celebrity-name scams stop being a moderation nuisance and become a pricing question — who pays for authenticated identity, and what happens to trust when the answer is 'anyone'.
The trend: Platform identity is moving from an earned signal (verification) to a purchased one (subscription), with each transition resetting the economics of celebrity impersonation scams.