Bitcoin Addresses Are Now Restricted On Twitter

In an effort to find a temp solution to deal with yesterday’s attack, Twitter has apparently made it impossible for users to post Tweets containing strings of letters and numbers in order to avoid any scam “giveaway” from sharing their cryptocurrency wallet addresses.

Something Went Wrong: Twitter Blocks Wallet Addresses

Indeed, when I tried to share a string of random letters and numbers, Twitter didn’t let me share the post public and asked me to “give it another shot.”

The move is meant to discourage scammers of the kind of yesterday’s attack from inviting innocent victims to send their valuable crypto funds for fictional purposes, i.e., charity, crowdfunding, or rewards.

Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey is going through one of its most devastating periods after an unprecedented hack. Con artists have managed to hack into the accounts of tech moguls, billionaires, politicians, celebrities, and companies to ask users to send Bitcoin funds.

The hack, which started from leading crypto leading figures such as CZ, CEO of Binance, Binance, and Coinbase exchanges, continued to Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Barack Obama, and Elon Musk.

The hacked accounts published tweets inviting victims to send their Bitcoin funds to an indicated address, in order to receive back “double the amount sent.” Despite that there are no free lunches, the wallet addresses used in the scam got filled with massive amounts of small transactions, summed up to a six-digit amount in USD equivalent.

After discovering the breach, Twitter limited several functionalities for a while, including disabling verified accounts from tweeting at all. Now it doesn’t let you share strings of letters and numbers, even if they don’t represent any cryptocurrency wallet.

The move is meant to keep users safe from fraudsters who share their cryptocurrency addresses in search of victims.

However, the new restrictions created some trouble to legendary Twitter account Whale Alert, which monitors large transactions. The bot is used to share transaction IDs, but now it had been blocked:

ℹ️ Due to anti-hack measures taken by Twitter the Whale Alert bot can no longer post any transfers and we cannot manually add them either. We hope Twitter will resolve the issue soon. Transfers are still being posted to our Telegram channel: https://t.co/vVRNZuovHX

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) July 16, 2020

Not an Isolated Cases for the Social Media Giant

CryptoPotato has reported extensively on the hack. However, it is not the first instance when Twitter demonstrates how vulnerable the site is.

Only a few weeks ago, Twitter informed its business clients that their personal data might have been compromised. Without the knowledge of users, billing information of some business clients was stored in the browser’s cache, and it was possible that others could access it. The social media operator told clients that personal data included the last four digits of card numbers, email addresses, and phone numbers.

The breach affected companies that use the website’s advertising department and analytics platforms, though we don’t know how many businesses were affected.