X slashes gold checking account prices by 80% as it is looking to draw more revenue for the social media platform.
X (formerly Twitter) announced that it is dropping the price of gold checkmarks for social media profiles to $200 monthly. The Gold checkmarks on Twitter signal official business accounts, offering a paid way for brands to enhance authenticity, visibility, and potential consumer trust.
Before Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, gold checkmarks for businesses didn’t exist. Verification was a one-size-fits-all system, granted to accounts deemed of public interest by Twitter itself.
These could include individuals, brands, media outlets, etc. Applications focused on factors like public engagement, notable coverage, and risk of impersonation.
Getting verified was highly competitive and often unpredictable, leaving many businesses without any official verification badge.
Elon Musk took over Twitter on October 27, 2022, after a lengthy process marked by negotiation, legal challenges, and public debate. The final deal closed for $44 billion, which included a combination of equity financing and debt secured by Musk.
After taking over, he introduced a scheme in which a blue checkmark on your Twitter profile was sold for $8 per month while a gold check mark, which was considered to be harder to get due to its high price tag, was given out for $1000/month.
If Musk thought that by introducing a $1000/month price tag, the scammers would refrain from using this because it wouldn’t prove to cost-effective, he was sorely mistaken.
According to a recently published report from CloudSek, a cybersecurity firm, threat actors focused on accounts linked to X that enrolled in gold check verification, a service available for organizations at a monthly cost of $1,000 starting from March 2023.
Authored by Rishika Desai the cybersecurity researcher highlighted extensive malicious campaigns targeting users with X accounts featuring job and crypto scams, particularly those associated with a Twitter Gold account.
In her report, Desai said: “The CloudSek research team identified such accounts on X (formerly Twitter), with a gold tick mark subscribed, posting links to malicious domains. These domains had different platforms, insisting their followers to join random channels based on crypto.”
On January 2, X announced a reduction in the price of gold checkmarks on its social media platform, decreasing from $1,000 to $200 per month for a “basic” plan.
Speculation arose that the price adjustments were aimed at attracting more paid subscribers on the social media platform.
Reports indicated the platform’s valuation at around $19 billion as of October 2023, which was less than half of Elon Musk’s 2022 investment. Many people commented on this news as Elon’s desperate attempt to recoup the money he paid when he acquired X.
According to CloudSek, scammers exploited unused or inactive X accounts, converting them into gold accounts and leveraging the verification system to promote crypto scams. Some perpetrators even offered to sell these compromised accounts to others online, fetching prices of up to $2,500.
X has been synonymous with crypto as a go-to place to acquire the latest news related to cryptocurrency. The platform was and still is favored by many crypto influencers as a place where they give their supposed insights into the market and their predictions regarding where the market will be heading.
Many accounts would share their trade successes on the platform to gain more followers and others would share links to their discords so that they could attract users to their paid services, where they would provide crypto signals to willing users for a promise to help them earn profit in their crypto investing journey.
The recent report related to scammers using the platform as a hub for committing scams and schemes to drain users of their hard-earned funds isn’t winning the case for the global adoption of cryptocurrency.
Even though the rate of increase for the adoption of digital assets is increasing, the use of social media platforms that have a following in millions if not billions across the globe isn’t what the promoters of cryptocurrency want to see.
Scammers have identified these platforms as their favorite places to carry out various phishing and hacking attempts.
In the past, hackers have seized control of the accounts belonging to U.S. President Joe Biden, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, and numerous individuals to promote scams related to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
The news is an eye-opener for many of the crypto community members who need to make sure that they educate themselves regarding the various techniques hackers use to exploit funds from them. They should remain vigilant and search for these hacking techniques so that they can safeguard themselves from any such attempts in the future and not fall prey to scam activities as well.
