| As explained in LunarCrush's recent blog, this activity continues to grow and be profitable, especially in developing economies. With a massive imbalance in global wealth distribution, it only makes sense that people in poorer countries can spend lots of time and energy trying to trick, hack or scam people from wealthier areas.
The Twitter takeover deal by Elon Musk is now effectively frozen because Twitter cannot accurately estimate the amount of spam on its own platform. Twitter says it's fewer than 5%, while Musk argues it's probably 20% and "could be *much* higher."
As Joe Vezzani, founder and CEO of LunarCrush, explained to me on the phone:
"For a web2 platform like Twitter, there is a direct incentive to turn a blind eye to fake accounts because it increases the value of their platform. In web3, if you have a tokenized incentives system, you want to have as many real users as possible who are holding the asset long term rather than trying to extract value from the community."
For Web 2.0 users involved in crypto, where all transactions are final and there's virtually zero fraud protection, users need to remain particularly vigilant. In the famous words of Kurt Cobain, "Just because you're paranoid, don't mean they're not after you... Gotta find a way, a better way, I'd better wait."
Stay safe everyone! | 