The platform announced that it would drop the price of gold checkmarks to $200 monthly, while a cybersecurity firm reported scammers had been taking advantage of the verification.
X (formerly Twitter) scaled back pricing for verified organizations on the social media platform as a report suggested groups had been using ‘gold check’ accounts to push crypto scams.
According to a Jan. 3 report from Rishika Desai of cybersecurity firm CloudSek, threat actors specifically targeted X accounts that signed up for the gold check verification, which organizations could purchase for $1,000 per month starting in March 2023. The cyber threat researcher reported that “malicious campaigns are brooding on a large scale that requires a Twitter Gold account,” targeting X users with job and crypto scams.
“[T]he CloudSek research team identified such accounts on X (formerly Twitter), with a gold tick mark subscribed, posting links to malicious domains,” said Desai. “These domains had [...] Different platforms, insisting their followers to join random channels based on crypto.”
