Internet security specialists Norton wrote about it last year: ‘Hackers have discovered that they can use Venmo to trick users into providing their bank account information or Social Security numbers.
#Venmo account hacked update
The Daily Swig has reached out to Twitter and will update this article if and when we receive a response.Both hacks were of the poker stars’ Venmo accounts, a PayPal-owned company that offers customers a peer-to-peer digital wallet, primarily used for paying day-to-day expenses but also as a quick-and-easy way to send funds to friends and family.įor poker pros such as Negreanu and Seidel, those expenses and transactions are likely to be generally much larger than most users, but it is not considered to be the safest place to store large sums of money. He added: “Don’t publicly link to your PayPal (or similar) account – deal with payments via direct message instead.” "A Twitter user would need to pay close attention to what is going on in order to notice what’s happened.” Patel said: “Given that the mechanism is automated, I’m willing to bet that the attack is fairly successful. They added: “It would be extremely easy to detect and prevent this behavior, let’s hope that finally does something about it… I would like for this warning to become obsolete.”Īndy Patel, researcher with F-Secure’s Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence, told The Daily Swig that he hasn’t seen this kind of bot during his own research, but reiterated Skye’s advice for users. “With DMs, either you’ve got them closed so the scam bot can’t send you any, or you’ve got them open and it’ll show as a DM request rather than just appear in your inbox.” In the meantime, Skye has advised: “A failsafe option is to ask for payment info via DM only, or request they be sent to you via DM.
The Daily Swig has reached out to Twitter to confirm whether it is aware of these payment-requesting bots and what steps it intends to take to protect users. Read more of the latest security news about social media networks They also claimed that this issue is “months, if not years old”. Skye’s tweets have already garnered thousands of retweets and likes. This latest scam, however, is a stark warning against making or disclosing any sort of transaction on a public forum. Venmo and other online payment services have become a popular means for users to pay for things such as charity donations or for goods such as the resale of event tickets. So the accounts are usually not brand new, they even have followers. Skye also warned: “They will delete the reply tweet, but the account itself will usually not be deleted, just change the username. They delete as fast as they clone your account. “If you see a ghost reply to a comment like that, it’s almost always a scam bot. “Because you’re blocked, you’ll see that there’s one reply to that question but the reply tweet won’t show up,” Skye wrote.
Skye noted that the bot blocks the account that it is mimicking, and in their case copied the whole profile and added an underscore to the end of the name. They masquerade as the other user by scraping their profile picture and adopting a similar username, before supplying them with false payment information in the hopes the original tweeter will pay into this account.īy way of example, Twitter user ‘Skye’ ( posted a screenshot online detailing how they were targeted by a bot.Ī screenshot of the Twitter bot in action The bots appear to be activated when a legitimate user asks another for their payment information, presumably discovering these tweets via a search for keywords such as ‘PayPal’, ‘Venmo’, or other services. Social engineering scammers are using cloned social media accounts to carry out deceitįraudsters are using Twitter bots to trick unsuspecting tweeters into making PayPal and Venmo payments to accounts under their control.
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