The mastermind behind SpaceX and Tesla took to Twitter to lay into crypto scams that have been marauding the platform for quite a while. In his tweet, the famous entrepreneur publicly mentioned Ethereum for the first time, although not in a context that ETH founder Vitalik Buterin would have wanted.

I want to know who is running the Etherium scambots! Mad skillz … — Buff Mage (@elonmusk) July 8, 2018

Even though he failed to spell ‘Ethereum’ correctly, Mr. Musk seemed to be impressed by the persistence of whoever is running the spam bots, praising their “mad skillz.”

Buterin was quick to reply and express his disappointment that such petty issues got the attention of Mr. Musk rather than some sophisticated tech aspect of ethereum. The ETH creator has added “not giving away ETH” to his official Twitter handle earlier this year to fight similar scams that have been one of the most significant issues of the crypto Twitter.

I do wish @elonmusk's first tweet about ethereum was about the tech rather than the twitter scambots……..@jack help us please? Or someone from the ETH community make a layer 2 scam filtering solution, please? https://t.co/biVRshZmne — vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) July 9, 2018

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was tagged by Buterin, who asked for his help as the number of scammers that are doing crypto “giveaways” has grown exponentially in 2018. To trick the naïve users, the fraudsters impersonated numerous celebrities such as Donald Trump, John McAfee as well as Buterin himself, who is probably the most frequent target.

The ‘giveaway’ posts usually appear in a celebrities feed, following a real post. Bots use the same profile picture and a Twitter handle that is very similar to the original, thus some inattentive users fall prey to the scam. They are asked to donate some ETH to confirm their address with a promise that the amount will be multiplied ten-fold.

Following the tweet, more bots jump into the bandwagon, rejoicing of their newly-acquired ETH and “confirming” that the offer is totally genuine. Needless to say that sending any ETH to verify your details in such giveaways is pretty much equivalent to throwing it away.

Reportedly, Twitter has been shutting down over a million fake accounts per day, which is a really staggering number. Of course, most of them are not related to crypto but even though the effort is admirable it does not seem to be enough as there are more crypto scams than ever before.

In order to discourage his followers to believe any of the fake Elon Musks in the Twitter realm, the Tesla founder revealed he did not own any virtual currencies. He also claimed to have reported the issue to Dorsey numerous times but we are yet to see a feasible solution.

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