Influencers masking rug pulls with new tactics

So, there's this guy with around 500k followers who just pulled a stunt: His post got crazy attention, over 300k interactions last I checked, and tons of folks actually bought into it. Check this account for the real Satoshi: Then not long after that post, he put up two more about a certain memecoin. Slipped my mind to grab a screenshot, but I definitely saw those two posts on his page after he racked up all that engagement. He used some flashy words that could easily trick newbies into buying the memecoin. Those posts disappeared after a day or so, probably because it was a scam and people got played. Now he’s added something to his original post about Satoshi’s wallet: Could we say he’s spreading FUD too?

There are way too many accounts that does this on a regular basis on X. Just seen someone with 1 million followers telling everyone that the white house said the DOJ didn't sell any of their BTC, when the actual news were the DOJ confirming not selling anything from Samurai's wallet seizure (because onchain data showed DOJ sent the funds to Coinbase). Same account did a "RUMOR: Trump to remove capital gain taxes on bitcoin" a few weeks back. Sadly, there isn't much to be done here, the followers should be the one holding these pages accountable by unfollowing them. For anyone browsing twitter, just don't pay attention to a post that starts with "BREAKING", "RUMOR", "ALERT", even if the news are true, they usually are nothing of significance.

His real intention for doing this has been fully expressed already from his second moves, introducing a memecoin, with the hope that all he said initially about Satoshi wallet and bitcoin could cause a stir in the market or maybe he could possibly use that to lure investor into his project and launch the big deal, pump and dump scheme, we have to be wise and avoid alts if we want to be under safety in cryptocurrency.

The need for DYOR principle at its finest. Or the fact that people nowadays are even more lazy to proof-check. Or both

Whoever is behind this and thousands of similar accounts is just trying to profit by using BTC as bait, while at the same time promoting some shitcoin that someone paid them a nice amount for. If people stopped paying attention to such things and if they simply delete social networks that allow scams and deceptions, then such "experts" would no longer exist.

This is why they are doing everything to have more followers, they don't tweet without it ending with " click the follow button " The plan is to carry out dirty missions like this one, which is why I don't blame people saying that tweeter is a bad place for a beginner to start his or her crypto journey. The likelihood of them going astray is very high.

You are right. This guy is actually trying to promote the memecoin to his massive followers while spreading FUD about Bitcoin. Majority of his followers will invest in these memecoin without conducting any research. It baffles me how social media followers and fans trust influencers so much that they will trust anything that is being sold to them by these influencers. This is definitely another pump and dump scheme, people just don't learn.

Only if you have not so click-bait-ish sources to follow.. I would say usual Forums / etc. is a much better place to start. Here, people are not incentivized to pull your attention by writing something that's just written for FOMO / FUD.

All the people who follow, engage with or even read what influencers are posting are complete idiots, among the lowest idiots that exist in the world just 1 level under the influencers themselves. Whoever is reading this, if you are one of these people you should be ashamed of yourself for your stupidity. 99.9% of the influencers are complete baboons with barely any education regardless of what degrees they may be holding. 99.9% of the things that are posting is generic junk or false information, they do this consistently. 99.9% of the scams in the years 2024 and 2025 were done by or promoted by these "influencers" for money. If you are the "fan" of anyone, you are an idiot. Yes, but the motive is not to spread FUD it is engagement farming. This is one of the latest tactics by idiots on that platform, and they do it because it works. Once they are unable to find adequate fearful information right now, they resort to making up completely fabricated stuff. This is the downside of the free speech policies that Musk allows, but I don't see why people who are consistently proven to be lying in trivial way should not be deplatformed. It is one thing to occasionally tell subjective lies or debatable truths, but it is a completely different thing to have a pattern of consistent lying for engagement farming. In most cases it is clear, and moderating it would be trivial.

I doubt sometimes if anyone actually does pay them to promote some of those shitcoins. I suspect them to be part of the creators of some of the pump-and-dump coins they promote, while take offers from other scammers when they can actually create and shill their own token and go with the bigger bag. I suspect most of these X accounts which make this type of post.

Reading everything here, what bothers me about the whole thing isn’t even the speculation, it’s the framing. He deliberately chose to use words like “wake up moment” to provoke emotion and not understanding. Anyone who has followed Bitcoin long enough knows Satoshi-linked claims require an extremely high bar of evidence which are lacking here. This obviously looks more like engagement farming than serious analysis.

There are times I scroll through Twitter, and I see some accounts, and I just ask myself, "Why exactly are over 200k people following such a person?" Is it that people don't think anymore? There are some accounts that all they care about is posting fake news, quotes and stats, yet they have so many followers. How do people just take everything given to them by these accounts? People use Twitter to push whatever agenda suits them these days. You have BRICS accounts just pushing all sorts of false and unverified updates,, and pro-Western accounts are doing the same. It's a mess. Even the current US administration uses it to push their own agenda. Recently, someone here shared a link to a Bitcoin account that was reposting Republican stuff. Its difficult to see authentic stuff on twitter these days.

For social media, it doesn't seem too strange to see this where even accounts that have been verified or even have thousands or even millions of followers will be very difficult to trust because everything is only the same where personal gain is what they expect. I even see bitcoin accounts (verified) which have even more followers in X doing exactly the same thing where personal gain is what they are looking for even though such conditions are not very reflective for accounts with the name bitcoin which should still be neutral. So this condition is not too strange for me and in fact this is a good reminder that we should not immediately swallow the news on social media before tracing the truth because it could be that it will lead to a trap.

Question is, are there people who actually believe this, or are there victims like they scam? If there are, I guess that is not their main goal. As someone who understands how monetization works on x.com, I think that is real purpose of why they do this. Based on tweet, there is no mention of any third party, like coins or cryptocurrency. This looks more like engagement farming. Maybe you are even one handling this twitter account, since this is like part of engagement farming. That is possible, right?

Even though it's a common practice on X by people to gain engagement on their account, I wonder why people reading their tweets are actually reacting and doing what they shouldn't be doing. I mean, you can't go ahead and buy a meme coin and expect to get profits from it only because you have seen a random tweet from a random person who were saying good words for it and he was trying to give crypto-related information to his followers earlier. One has to be smarter than this, especially when it comes to making investments in a market which is highly volatile, unpredictable, and full of scams. By the way, why are we calling people holding accounts with good followers on X influencers? The ways they use to farm engagement and increase their followers is basically making tweets where they ask users to like, retweet, and post their addresses to win a specific reward, or posts like the one mentioned in this thread, they don't have those followers because they are doing a noble thing, or are famous around the world for their work on social media, etc. They don't deserve to be called influencers, in my opinion.

I think the followers are under spell already . Apart from bots and jerks who just follow for shitposting, for a user to actually follow these guys then they must have been interested in what they post and likely might have little to no idea of what are being posted but atleast wants to get better , and then the  average general  users. Most of them have zero ideas of what to really research when they see all these kinds of posts, they just believe it. And then they get a particular minor information or news and make it some kinda big deal for example the recent drop to 92k. So much tweets and even yt videos about it  They also have some kinda cycling group where they just retweet continuously to reach more people for engagement. It’s both, once they agree to anything then they are part of the scheme either just getting paid to promote or just promoting to get a share. Their major  role is always to promote though because they have reach to pool of users.

First we must understand that Bitcoin doesn't have an "X" account. If we understand this from the start when large accounts use Bitcoin information as bait, we won't be affected. Because it's certain that large accounts are paid to promote various "shitcoins." Even "X" accounts with the username @bitcoin, promote "shitcoins," even though many people think it's a genuine Bitcoin account. So, this comes back to "X" users who are always wise in selecting information and following accounts with large followings. We must understand that every large account has a different agenda to generate profits by promoting something that will benefit them.

Yeah and do you think that the situation somewhere else is better? Most of the people with a large number of followers on Instagram, TikTok and other platforms are complete idiots posting the worst idiotic things imaginable. The only real difference is that different kind of idiotic things work well on different platforms when it comes to engagement farming. Anyway, your feed is very tailored to you and you may see quite a different picture if you are not interested in crypto and not following any relevant content. Furthermore, don't believe that Twitter is being used primarily to spread agendas and unverified information. The countries are doing the same using every media at their disposal. If you believe that the media that you are consuming is honest, you're already partially brainwashed. Have you been living under a 3rd world rock? If things didn't work, nobody would do them. If it is done en masse, it means that they work well. Influencers on Twitter have been the prime reason for all the shitcoin scams in the last 2 years. It is not good at all but the issue is that it is hard to solve. You either have free speech and the situation goes a bit out of control, it is not much better on this forum. You have countless people account farming and shitposting the most generic junk imaginable. The negative effects are not comparable to spreading false information on Twitter, but nevertheless it demonstrates what happens when you do free speech the wrong way. On the other hand, if you restrict speech too much it quickly spirals into an abusive censorship machine. We've seen this during COVID, a lot of the things that were censored in the early days of the pandemic and claimed to be lies ended up being 100% factually correct. Preferably, people would "deplatform" others by unfollowing them after they have been exposed for lying or posting junk. However, most people are stupid and generic characters in this simulation of life so we can't solve it this way either.

I will say it again: anyone who thinks that Satoshi hasn't sold bitcoin is naive.  Perhaps not from the 2009 era wallets, but he did not stop mining thereafter so there are plenty of "non satoshi linked wallets" that could be used.    And was you point out, why do people fall for nonsense like this?

Because it's flashy and sells good for the relevant audience