From Fake News to Fake IDs, two announcements on January 30th highlight a continuing problem in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Neo Smart Economy identified a fake ID on Twitter calling itself @Blockchain_NEO, whereas the official account title is @NEO_Blockchain. Scammers told users that the \"First 250 transcations\" [sic] would receive 10 NEO if they provided their email addresses. A similar scam was perpetrated the previous day on IOTA.

Similarly, also on Twitter, a fake account masquerading under the name of Litecoin founder, Charlie Lee, was offering free LTC (currently worth $173.55 each) in return for a small payment. The scammer told competing users they would get 3LTC ($520.65) from Lee if they sent 0.3 LTC to a specified address.

It seems obvious, but even the obvious will catch a few small payments. Anyone who knows anything about Litecoin would know that Lee had already sold most of his holdings. The address, like the NEO fake account, is sufficiently similar, using @SatoshiLitez rather than the official @SatoshiLite, but so far no payments have been reported.

Earlier in the month, a clutch of fake ICO websites were launched around the Telegram coin offering, calling themselves gramtoken, ton-gram, t-gram, etc. There are always going to be risks, but social media accounts are particularly vulnerable to hackers and can easily catch the unwary.