It should come as no surprise that a rumoured $25 million cryptocurrency giveaway on the social media site formerly known as Twitter is indeed too good to be true.
The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), which, as a result of a recent court victory, may be on the verge of being converted into a preferred traditional financial investment vehicle known as an ETF, is the subject of posts on X on Thursday and Friday.
The main claim is that anybody who visit a website indicated in the post would receive $25 million of a new coin called GBTC, which is the ticker symbol for the real $13 billion trust.
The catch: This offer is obviously a scam because the @Grayscale_FND account, which is making these promises, is unrelated to the actual Grayscale corporation, as a Grayscale official verified on Friday.
A blue checkmark, like the one on @Grayscale_FND’s account, was a sign the account was verified before Elon Musk acquired Twitter and renamed it X. This indicated that some kind of consideration and verification had taken place before the account received that title. Now that it means the account owner can pay $8 a month, there are many more cryptocurrency frauds using blue-checked X accounts.
The actual @Grayscale X account has a gold checkmark, which is a symbol used by businesses and other “official” institutions. That new distinction is one thing an X user would need to be aware of in order to prevent being deceived. However, people can also be duped by the fact that @Grayscale_FND is using the genuine Grayscale’s logo.
Because someone bombarded @Grayscale_FND with it on X, a journalist learned about his posts. There is no way to contact @Grayscale_FND because it won’t respond to direct messages from accounts it doesn’t follow.
Like CoinDesk, Grayscale is a property of the Digital Currency Group.
Press email addressed to X received the following response: “Busy now, please check back later.”