The morning after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck Turkey and Syria, Haluk Levent, a popular musician in Turkey, met with the country’s financial watchdog to allow the set up of crypto wallets to collect donations. Within hours, Levent managed to tweet the addresses of three new crypto wallets that people can donate to, which accept donations for one week. But shortly after his tweet, fraudulent accounts began to pop up on Twitter with their own crypto-wallets linked, claiming to be charities helping the victims in Turkey.
Levent warned his followers to report the accounts. One account in question was using the same name and logo as the NGO that Levent runs called AHBAP, which helps victims on the ground in Turkey. See: How to help Turkey earthquake victims: ‘Give cash’ and ‘take the long view’ Neither the legitimate AHBAP account nor the scam AHBAP account have a verification check mark from Twitter, despite users tagging Twitter and Elon Musk to verify the actual NGO. The scam account was eventually taken down by Twitter. The social-media platform didn’t respond to request for comment regarding whether it will verify the real AHBAP account. The situation led many experts and crypto users to warn others about donating cryptocurrencies to a potential scam wallet, which can be hard to spot to the untrained eye.
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