Scammers appear to have wasted no time since the launch of Meta’s new microblogging app, with several high-profile Crypto Twitter users already warning of imposter accounts on Threads.
Threads was launched on July 5 and has seen sign-ups climb above 98 million in the days following. It’s still far away from Twitter’s estimated 450 million users.
However, over the past few days, multiple Crypto Twitter figures have already highlighted fake accounts on Threads impersonating others or themselves.
On July 8, decentralized finance platform Wombex Finance tweeted an image of a Threads account impersonating it — warning it could be a scammer as the project isn’t on the platform.
The nonfungible token influencer Leonidas tweeted a similar warning a day earlier to their 93,000 followers, saying that they and other “large NFT accounts” are being impersonated by scammers on Threads. Leonidas said they have now made an account on Threads to combat impersonators.
For years, Twitter has been a popular channel for crypto phishing scammers, with a common tactic involving hacking into the Twitter accounts of well-known people and businesses and posting malicious links.
Such links usually attempt to dupe unwitting targets into sharing either their crypto exchange login, a crypto wallet seed phrase or have them connect a wallet to a crypto-draining smart contract.
In the first half of this year, $108 million worth of crypto was stolen in such phishing scams according to a report by Web3 security firm Beosin.
