If you’ve been on Twitter (X) since Elon Musk took over, you’ve likely noticed the influx of fake advertisements. They often parody news organizations like the CBC or political figures in Canada.
CBC News didn’t take this lightly, and traced down the ads as much as it could, discovering an IP linked to Velcom in Barrie, Ont. Velcom told the news organization that it leases IPs to a Texas company called IPXO. The trail went cold here as IPXO never responded to the publication.
CBC was also able to trace the server hosting company to Amsterdam and St. Petersburg in Russia. However, this is just where the server is hosted, so it does little to actually nail down the nationality of the scammers.
It should also be noted that these scams are happening all over the world, and various celebrities and news organizations are being featured. However, scammers unknowingly utilize regular people as well. CBC News discovered that sometimes small businesses without Twitter profiles are being spoofed to give the fake poster an extra air of legitimacy.
In one of the examples discovered, the fake profile even links back to the small business’s real website, but when asked for comment, the owners had no knowledge of the posting.
If you click on one of these fake ads, it takes you to a website where you can read a fake story that will push you toward links for a crypto scam called Quantum AI. This fake crypto scam has been running for years in various forms.
That said, it’s best practice to avoid any ads that look like news since most major news organizations don’t pay for social media advertising. It also appears that most of these scam accounts pay for the Twitter membership so they can have a verified checkmark, so remember that those checks don’t actually mean anything anymore.
Header image: Shutterstock
Source: CBC News
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