Crypto Users Beware: X’s New Rules Could Get You Banned

Years of crypto scams running havoc on the social network X, formerly known as Twitter, have resulted in the implementation of a “kill switch” for users talking about crypto.

The announcement of the toughest anti-crypto scam measure to date was made by Nikita Bier, X’s Head of Product, through a post on the same social media on Wednesday.

Yeah we’re aware.

We are in the process of implementing auto-locking + verification if a user posts about cryptocurrency for the first time in the history of their account.

This should kill 99% of the incentive, especially since Google isn’t doing shit to stop the phishing…

The measure was brought to public attention after Bier, who is also a Solana ecosystem advisor, replied to a post from UK-based web3 creator Benjamin White. In his thread, White explained how his account had been phished via a fake copyright email. This led to his X account being compromised and used to promote a crypto scam.

Yeah – I got phished.

You can listen to exactly what happened here, or read the article below.

Now, according to the new guidelines, X can auto‑lock an account it mentions crypto for the first time, and force extra checks before it can post again. Bier’s argue this should kill most of the incentive, making freshly hijacked or newly spun‑up accounts effectively useless to scammers.

In a different post from the same day, Bier laid out the way suspensions works and reiterated that some financial scams are running “rampant” on the platform.

For context:

All suspensions are determined by the policy team; no one, including me, has unilateral decisionmaking authority. Having said that:

• This was posted on March 31st, not April 1 • Fake X-trademarked financial scams run rampant on this platform • Soliciting…

Bier also replied to a concerned user inquiring about “community-mention spam attacks” (when accounts tag a lot of people at the same time to promote cryptocurrencies) assuring that such activity should also now be blocked on the site.

That community-mention spam attack should be blocked as of yesterday afternoon.

The platform will also detect fraudulent memecoin activity. Yesterday, Bier corrected a now deleted Community Note explaining that “it is always a hack” when a high-profile account without any previous relation to crypto suddenly drops a memecoin. The social network will now require account ownership verification in such cases.

Wrong.

If you have more than 10k followers and you drop a meme coin without any prior connection to crypto, it is always a hack.

We will be detecting that and requiring account ownership verification — to reduce the incentive to phish X accounts.

The usual playbook for this type of scams include phishing emails posing as copyright or security warnings, fake login pages, stealing passwords and 2FA, then using captured X accounts to blast out scam links and tokens. X is a valuable target for scammers because it allows them to tap in the reputation of real users and their follower networks, not to mention the speed at which posts can go viral in “crypto Twitter” culture.

The social network has taken legal action against banned users in the past, including crypto fraudsters, who tried to bribe employees to get suspended accounts reinstated, describing this as part of a broader criminal network. X’s Global Government Affairs account publicly framed this as “strong action against a bribery network targeting our platform,” explicitly linking it to suspended crypto‑scam accounts.

X has exposed and is taking strong action against a bribery network targeting our platform. Suspended accounts involved in crypto scams and platform manipulation paid middlemen to attempt to bribe employees to reinstate their suspended accounts. These perpetrators exploit social…

The new measure of auto‑locking first‑time crypto posters makes hijacked accounts less monetizable, raises costs for scam rings, and could sharply cut opportunistic phishing campaigns. On the downside, legitimate newcomers to crypto, small creators, and journalists could face friction, false positives, or temporary silencing at the exact moment they try to enter the conversation.

Cover image from Perplexity. BTCUSD chart from Tradingview.