As a professional translator, I have translated the news article into English as follows:
CoinW.com reports:
Due to the expected airdrop of Blast on Wednesday, there has been a sudden influx of malicious links on Twitter, as scammers appear to be taking advantage of tools designed specifically for verified organizations.
One suspicious link even made its way onto Blast’s official Discord server, after which a link that could potentially drain wallets was removed by the community moderators.
Users of Ethereum’s Layer 2 scaling network were collectively set to receive 17 billion BLAST tokens as part of the network’s initial airdrop. The issuance of Blast was created by the makers of the incentivized NFT marketplace Blur and had an initial market value of $392 million.
However, numerous false posts claimed that the airdrop of Blast had started much earlier than expected. Several accounts with profile pictures and display names that appeared to be the same as Blast’s legitimate Twitter (a.k.a. X) account lured users to hastily visit fake websites, accompanied by the “checkmark” token introduced by the current owner of the platform, Elon Musk.
One account named studio_tribu wrote, “The moment you’ve all been waiting for. The $BLAST allocation checker is now live!”
Scam links on crypto Twitter are nothing new, but the abundance of false posts on Wednesday highlighted the ongoing challenge the platform faces in combating bad actors. At least a dozen accounts impersonating Blast and boasting about having a checkmark sent out affiliate links to verified organizations, with all of these accounts heavily posting false content.
Screenshot of a Blast airdrop scam post (URL obscured). Image: Decrypt
For instance, the Twitter site said that every applicant wishing to become a verified organization would go through a review process. However, an account named Blast_L2_now__ had already been verified simply by adding “_now__” to the actual Twitter username of Blast, attempting to entice users to click on the scam link and connect their wallets.
According to cybersecurity firm Scam Sniffer, one victim lost $217,000 worth of cryptocurrencies after visiting a phishing website impersonating Blast. Scam Sniffer wrote that the user unknowingly signed multiple phishing signatures at the same time.
One of the pseudonymous core contributors to the project, known as neried, mentioned that a scam link was also shared in Blast’s official Discord community. “Do not click,” the account warned another Discord member, “the link is invalid.”
Verified organizations receive an additional stipend of at least $200 per month, which includes priority support and prominent exposure on Twitter. According to the platform’s website, this service also includes monitoring accounts for impersonation. Verified organizations can provide affiliate badges and checkmarks to employees or advocates, but this clearly opens the door to potential abuse.
Blast’s legitimate Twitter employs a common defense measure to combat impersonation that many crypto projects use. When threads are stitched together, it warns users in the last tweet, “This is the last tweet in this thread,” while cautioning users to be aware of impersonators.
Nevertheless, this kind of fear of missing out (FOMO) that permeates many cryptocurrency traders still manages to lure some users into clicking on illicit links without conducting proper due diligence, often at a high cost.
Edited by Andrew Hayward.
