Blast’s upcoming airdrop on Wednesday has created a minefield of malicious links on Twitter, as scammers appear to be taking advantage of tools designed for verified organizations.
A suspicious link also made its way into Blast’s official Discord server, with a link that could potentially drain wallets being removed by the community moderators.
Users on Ethereum’s Layer 2 scaling solution have been collectively set to receive 17 billion BLAST tokens as part of the network’s initial airdrop. Blast, created by the incentivized NFT marketplace Blur, debuted with an initial market cap of $3.92 billion.
However, numerous false posts have claimed that Blast’s airdrop was starting much earlier than anticipated. Several accounts with profile pictures and display names that appeared to be the same as Blast’s legitimate Twitter (aka X) account lured users into hastily visiting fake websites, touting a “verification check” for the platform’s current owner, Elon Musk.
An account under the name studio_tribu wrote, “The moment you’ve all been waiting for. $BLAST distribution checker is now live!”
Scam links on crypto Twitter are nothing new, but Wednesday saw a significant surge in false posts, highlighting the platform’s ongoing battle against bad actors. At least a dozen accounts impersonated Blast, boasting a verification badge and affiliations with verified organizations, all while extensively posting false content.
For instance, the website for Twitter states that each applicant wishing to become a verified organization will undergo a review. However, an account named Blast_L2_now__ has already been verified, simply by adding “_now__” to the actual Twitter username for Blast, attempting to lure users into clicking scam links and connecting their wallets.
According to the cybersecurity company Scam Sniffer, one victim lost $217,000 worth of cryptocurrency after visiting a phishing website that mimicked Blast. Scam Sniffer wrote that the user inadvertently signed multiple phishing signatures at the same time.
One of the pseudonymous core contributors to the project, neried, shared a scam link in Blast’s official Discord community. “Do not click,” the account warned another Discord member, “saying the link is not valid.”
Verified organizations pay a minimum of $200 extra stipend per month, which includes priority support and prominent performance on Twitter. According to the platform’s website, the service also includes monitoring accounts for impersonation. Verified organizations can provide their employees or advocates with affiliated badges and verification badges, which evidently also open the door to potential abuse.
Blast’s legitimate Twitter has adopted a common defense measure to combat the impersonation that many cryptocurrency projects face. When threads are strung together, it concludes with a warning to users that “this is the last tweet in this thread,” while alerting them to imitators.
Even so, this fosters FOMO among many cryptocurrency traders and is still able to lure some users into illegal links without conducting due diligence, often at a high cost.
Andrew Hayward, Editor
