A third of the fine came from one of the first moves Musk made when taking over Twitter. In November 2022, he changed the platform's historical use of a blue checkmark to verify the identities of notable users. Instead, Musk started selling blue checks for about $8 per month, immediately prompting a wave of imposter accounts pretending to be notable celebrities, officials, and brands.
A growing number of scammers are impersonating TechCrunch reporters and event leads and reaching out to companies, pretending to be our staff when they absolutely are not. These bad actors are using our name and reputation to try to dupe unsuspecting businesses. It drives us crazy and infuriates us on your behalf. It ebbs and flows. Judging by the increased number of emails we're receiving, asking, "Does this person really work for you?" it appears to be happening more actively at the moment.
Our automated systems are also getting better at catching these scams before they reach people. The expansion of facial recognition technology in particular more than doubled the volume of celebrity-bait scam ads we were able to detect and remove in testing. Today, there are nearly 500,000 public figures that are being protected from having their likeness misused in these scams.