* **Summary**: Some online platforms apply badges of verification to accounts which meet certain criteria.<br><br>On some platforms (such as dating apps) a verification badge signifies that the account has passed the platform’s identity verification checks. On some platforms (such as X (previously Twitter)) a verification badge signifies that an account has paid for the platform’s service.
| [I00113 Inside the Shadowy World of Disinformation for Hire in Kenya](../../generated_pages/incidents/I00113.md) | Researchers at Mozilla examined influence operations targeting Kenyan citizens on Twitter in 2021, providing <i>“a grim window into the booming and shadowy industry of Twitter influencers for political hire here in Kenya”.</i> The report touches upon how actors gained access to twitter accounts, and what personas they presented:<br><br><i>Verified accounts are complicit. One influencer we spoke to mentioned that the people who own coveted “blue check” accounts will often rent them out for disinformation campaigns. These verified accounts can improve the campaign’s chances of trending. Says one interviewee: “The owner of the account usually receives a cut of the campaign loot”.<br><br>[...]<br><br>Many of the accounts we examined appear to give an aura of authenticity, but in reality they are not authentic. Simply looking at their date of creation won’t give you a hint as to their purpose. We had to dig deeper. The profile pictures and content of some of the accounts gave us the answers we were looking for. A common tactic these accounts utilize is using suggestive pictures of women to bait men into following them, or at least pay attention. In terms of content, many of these accounts tweeted off the same hashtags for days on end and will constantly retweet a specific set of accounts.</i><br><br>Actors participating in this operation rented out verified Twitter accounts (in 2021 a checkmark on Twitter verified a user’s identity), which were repurposed and used updated account imagery (T0146.003: Verified Account Asset, T0150.007: Rented Asset, T0150.004: Repurposed Asset, T00145.006: Attractive Person Account Imagery). |
| [I00116 Blue-tick scammers target consumers who complain on X](../../generated_pages/incidents/I00116.md) | <i>Consumers who complain of poor customer service on X are being targeted by scammers after the social media platform formerly known as Twitter changed its account verification process.<br><br>Bank customers and airline passengers are among those at risk of phishing scams when they complain to companies via X. Fraudsters, masquerading as customer service agents, respond under fake X handles and trick victims into disclosing their bank details to get a promised refund.<br><br>They typically win the trust of victims by displaying the blue checkmark icon, which until this year denoted accounts that had been officially verified by X.<br><br>Changes introduced this year allow the icon to be bought by anyone who pays an £11 monthly fee for the site’s subscription service, renamed this month from Twitter Blue to X Premium. Businesses that pay £950 a month receive a gold tick. X’s terms and conditions do not state whether subscriber accounts are pre-vetted.<br><br>Andrew Thomas was contacted by a scam account after posting a complaint to the travel platform Booking.com. “I’d been trying since April to get a refund after our holiday flights were cancelled and finally resorted to X,” he said.<br><br>“I received a response asking me to follow them, and DM [direct message] them with a contact number. They then called me via WhatsApp asking for my reference number so they could investigate. Later they called back to say that I would be refunded via their payment partner for which I’d need to download an app.”<br><br>Thomas became suspicious and checked the X profile. “It looked like the real thing, but I noticed that there was an unexpected hyphen in the Twitter handle and that it had only joined X in July 2023,” he said.</i><br><br>In this example a newly created paid account was created on X, used to direct users to other platforms (T0146.002: Paid Account Asset, T0146.003: Verified Account Asset, T0146.005: Lookalike Account ID, T0097.205: Business Persona, T0122: Direct Users to Alternative Platforms, T0143.003: Impersonated Persona, T0151.008: Microblogging Platform, T0150.001: Newly Created Asset). |
| [I00120 factcheckUK or fakecheckUK? Reinventing the political faction as the impartial factchecker](../../generated_pages/incidents/I00120.md) | Ahead of the 2019 UK Election during a leader’s debate, the Conservative party rebranded their “Conservative Campaign Headquarters Press” account to “FactCheckUK”:<br><br><i>The evening of the 19th November 2019 saw the first of three Leaders’ Debates on ITV, starting at 8pm and lasting for an hour. Current Prime Minister and leader of the Conservatives, Boris Johnson faced off against Labour party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Plenty of people will have been watching the debate live, but a good proportion were “watching” (er, “twitching”?) via Twitter. This is something I’ve done in the past for certain shows. In some cases I just can’t watch or listen, but I can read, and in other cases, the commentary is far more interesting and entertaining than the show itself will ever be. This, for me, is just such a case. But very quickly, all eyes turned upon a modestly sized account with the handle @CCHQPress. That’s short for Conservative Campaign Headquarters Press. According to their (current!) Twitter bio, they are based in Westminster and they provide “snippets of news and commentary from CCHQ” to their 75k followers.<br><br>That is, until a few minutes into the debate.<br><br>All at once, like a person throwing off their street clothes to reveal some sinister new identity underneath, @CCHQPress abruptly shed its name, blue Conservative logo, Boris Johnson banner, and bio description. Moments later, it had entirely reinvented itself.<br><br>The purple banner was emblazoned with white font that read “✓ factcheckUK [with a “FROM CCQH” subheading]”.<br><br>The matching profile picture was a white tick in a purple circle. The bio was updated to: “Fact checking Labour from CCHQ”. And the name now read factcheckUK, with the customary Twitter blue (or white depending on your phone settings!) validation tick still after it</i><br><br>In this example an existing verified social media account on Twitter was repurposed to inauthentically present itself as a Fact Checking service (T0151.008: Microblogging Platform, T0150.003: Pre-Existing Asset, T0146.003: Verified Account Asset, T0097.203: Fact Checking Organisation Persona, T0143.002: Fabricated Persona). |
