Wait, so Ryan Sean Adams isn’t my new BFF?
Originally published on my blog, EleniThinks.com.
I recently discovered that I dodged what might have been a big bullet - someone trying to scam me on Twitter - and, I like to think, lost a potential new BFF. By this point, I’m used to the Telegram DMs pretending to be co-workers asking me “to help get them out of a serious situation by providing my private key” but I didn’t know a Twitter scam was even possible!
Here’s what happened so it doesn’t happen to you. The TL;DR: make sure you’re following legitament accounts.
Ryan Sean Adams wants to be BFFs?!
A few weeks ago I got a DM from Ryan Sean Adams with the always intriguing “hello.” Admittedly, I thought this was strange. Ryan and I had exchanged a few emails in the past, so why would he switch communication platforms? Maybe, though, Twitter was his happy place and easier to chat on, so I responded.
After some back and forth (I’ll spare you how uninteresting the conversation was) and a busy work week that resulted in a very delayed response on my end, I returned to the conversation to discover I was no longer speaking with Ryan but with Gone Girl.
Huh?
Utterly confused, I began to dig. I went back into my email to confirm Ryan did indeed message me.
Having proof I wasn’t living in the Matrix, I went back to Twitter to check out my new conversation with Gone Girl.
You can see the message is exactly the same as the one from Ryan (in my email) and from Gone Girl (in my Twitter DMs) where now a very kind Gone Girl was offering to teach me how to mine crypto.
I clicked on the Gone Girl account and saw I was following her.
I then quickly searched to see if there was another Gone Girl (perhaps this one was taking a page from the Telegram scammer book and using an “0” instead of “O”). Indeed there was! And one with many more followers.
So Ryan Sean Adams and I aren’t BFFs?
After figuring all this out, I went back to the email and noticed that Ryan wasn’t Ryan Adams but Ryan Adamss.
My best guess at what happened was I started following an account and then the scammer used that account to impersonate various crypto personalities with a lot of followers. The scammer then DMed people that followed the real account.
In my case, the account DMed me as Ryan because I follow the real Ryan Adams.
While our conversation never progressed as far as an attempt to scam me out of anything, I’m fairly confident it was going in that direction (unless there really is some kind soul that hopes to educate the world on crypto mining?).
The Fix?
Double check who you are following! And be aware such scams are not just on Telegram.
Stay safe.