Good day everybody,
Welcome to CryptoGod-1's blog on all things crypto. I am sure plenty of you were aware and active for the recent airdrop by Arbitrum, but it seems like things have not all gone quite to plan, especially in terms of their social media. Below I will outline how and why the official Arbitrum Twitter account got briefly suspended.
Arbitrum Airdrop
It has been a busy couple of weeks for Arbitrum, with their much-hyped rollout of the ARB governance token having launched at block 16890400. The airdrop took place on Thursday the 23rd of March once that block had been reached, and such with many token launches, there was plenty of hype around it. With Arbitrum bring a layer 2 rollout platform for Ethereum, allowing users to pay lower gas fees to transact on the Ethereum blockchain, there was plenty of reason to be excited, and those who had been making use of the platform prior to the airdrop were the lucky ones who received the free ARB tokens.
Enter the scammers. With so much hype and talk about the airdrop, it was the perfect opportunity for scammers to prey on the community. Through the use of social media accounts and elaborate phishing schemes they sent many links and scams to a littany of unwitting investors, which unfortunately resulted in some believing they were real. The result was many people connecting to sham sites in the belief the airdrop was happening, and instead of getting some nice free ARB tokens, instead they saw their wallets drained. Many of those scam account are still live on Twitter and sending out messages to people.
Scams and Blocking
On Monday the 27th of March 2023 the official Twitter account for Arbitrum was suspended by Twitter, was the Arbitrum Foundation stating that Twitter had flagged their account in error and it was reinstated a couple of hours later. It was initially confirmed by the co-founder of Offchain Labs, the company behind Arbitrum, Harry Kalodner although he was unsure as to why Twitter had decided to suspend their account. According to a representative for the Arbitrum Foundation they were informed by Twitter Support:
"we have systems that find and remove multiple automated spam accounts in bulk, and yours was flagged as spam by mistake."
The news was all over Twitter in an instant, with many prominent accounts tweeting how the main Arbitrum Twitter page had been suspended which given its recent launch and airdrop, along with the huge following it has garnered, raised a moment of fear in the community as to why it may have happened.
However plenty of other users were on hand to point out that since the tweet claiming the account had been suspended went live, the account had since been reinstated as the entire scenario was just a misunderstanding.
Given the sheer number of spam accounts associated with Arbitrum in the last few weeks since the airdrop announcement, it is not surprising that their official account got mixed up in all of this. Many would have been flagging and reporting the variety of spam accounts which are messaging users on Twitter, Reddit, and other social media platforms, claiming they need to click a link to get their free airdrop tokens. Of course these are all scams, and the official airdrop is happening on the Arbitrum site. As noted in the tweet below, while it was unclear exactly why the real account got taken down while many, many spam accounts remained live, the sheer number of spammers sending phishing spam links was in the thousands. The popularity of Arbitrum certainly caught the attention of the spammers, and they went full throttle with their attacks.
A developer for the rollup, Togrhul Mahararramov, also stated that Twitter had been "consistently awful" for allowing scam accounts to proliferate while the authentic Arbitrum account was pulled offline. While Twitter is such a vast and open platform in terms of accounts and users, it is disappointing to say the least that so many scam accounts are allowed to continue but that the actual official account was flagged and suspended.
The suspension also had a significant impact on the price of the token, with it dropping around 12% since the account was suspended, although that is also reflective of how the entire crypto market has reacted since the news of Binance, and MicroStrategy, was announced.
Have a great day and watch out for all those scammers, plenty of them out there.
Peace. CryptoGod-1.
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