A total of 95,111 scam lists, created from 87,617 accounts, on the Twitter Lists function were responsible for ‘free crypto giveaway’ scams that led to $870,000 in financial losses between June 2022 and June 2023. That’s according to new research from San Diego State University, which developed a fully automated scam detection system called GiveawayScamHunter.

By scanning the lists and tracking transactions of the scam cryptocurrency addresses, they found 327 free giveaway domains and 121 new scam cryptocurrency addresses. They also uncovered over 365 victims have been attacked by the scams, with a collective estimated loss of approximately $870,000.

“This work sheds light on the tactics, scale, and impact of free giveaway scams disseminated on Twitter Lists, emphasizing the urgent need for effective detection and prevention mechanisms to protect social media users from such fraudulent activity,” the researchers said.

High crypto prices

Twitter Lists are a function on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) where users can customize, organize and prioritize the posts they see in their timelines. Users can also add others to lists without their permission, something the report says scammers have taken advantage of.

“We found that its permission-less and pushing features have been abused by scammers to actively push the scam to Twitter users,” it says.

In their findings, the researchers saw a link between the scam activity on X and the fluctuations in the cryptocurrency market. Specifically, the scammers were more active at the times of high crypto prices.

“The free giveaway scam is an investment scam which exploits victims’ desire of making profits quickly. Due to the anonymity and in-reversibility of blockchain, the victims’ financial loss is difficult to recover.”

Researchers at San Diego State University

They also observed that to “disseminate scams more effectively”, most scammers avoided using the same account and instead registered new accounts. They then created multiple lists to target a wider audience, leveraging an account’s reputation to infuse trust and lure users to participate in the giveaway scam.

The majority of the scam lists focused on the two most popular cryptos bitcoin and ethereum, followed by XRP and baby doge.

“The free giveaway scam is an investment scam which exploits victims’ desire of making profits quickly. Due to the anonymity and in-reversibility of blockchain, the victims’ financial loss is difficult to recover,” the researchers added. “It is thus important to raise people’s awareness of such a scam.”

At the time of the published report, almost 44% of spam accounts remained active on X.