Dogecoin Drops Sharply After Twitter Blue Bird Returns
Dogecoin, the eighth biggest cryptocurrency by market cap and Elon Musk’s favorite digital asset, has continued its plunge in value after its logo was dropped from the Twitter website.
Dogecoin fell as much as 9% as some Twitter users began to see their home buttons on the social media platform revert back to its iconic blue-bird logo after a few days of being replaced by the dog meme associated with the cryptocurrency.
The original “meme coin” was down 8% at the time of writing, trading for $0.086, according to CoinGecko. It sharply dropped in value Thursday afternoon Eastern Time, as much as 6% in an hour, just after the Dogecoin logo disappeared from Twitter’s platform.
Dogecoin’s (DOGE) logo, a Shiba Inu dog meme, on Monday mysteriously appeared on Twitter’s website, replacing the blue bird logo. Its value then surged by over 20%.
But today, the bird logo has returned and the dog has gone. Elon Musk, who owns Twitter and frequently talks about DOGE, is yet to give an explanation as to why the microblogging website’s logo changed in the first place.
Dogecoin was invented in 2013 by a group of engineers as a joking tribute to the “doge” meme of a Shiba Inu dog. The idea was to poke fun at Bitcoin, the biggest and oldest digital asset.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk—and the world’s on-off richest man—started pumping the coin on Twitter in 2020 by posting memes, and it went up in value and gained a cult following.
Since then, Musk and fellow billionaire investor Mark Cuban have said that the coin could be used one day as a serious cryptocurrency for payments.
The asset is currently trading 88% lower than its November 2021 all-time high of $0.73.
On Thursday morning, the official Shark Tank Twitter account of Kevin O’Leary, nicknamed Mr. Wonderful, began advertising cryptocurrency giveaways in the form of bitcoin and ethereum. The account claimed that O’Leary has chosen to donate 5,000 bitcoin and 15,000 ether. Since he has gained so much money from cryptocurrencies in recent years. In addition, the tweet contains a link that enables readers to participate in the fraudulent cryptocurrency offer.
According to the O’Leary Twitter account, it has not been hacked and the freebies are legitimate. A fabrication that Mr. Wonderful said last night on CNBC. That he would give away some cryptocurrency for real was also included.
Kevin O’Leary’s Twitter gets hacked, starts promoting crypto giveaways
Earlier this year, crypto scam losses since 2021 hit $1 billion. Cryptocurrency scams are common, and as more people have started investing through crypto apps, fraud reports have skyrocketed.
Crypto scams target unsuspecting people, and you could be one of them. A crypto giveaway scam, like the one in question here, is a popular type of scam designed to get people to send scammers their cryptocurrency. Scammers impersonate a celebrity online, normally choosing one associated with crypto such as O’Leary. They send messages claiming to be holding a giveaway for anyone who wants to participate. The link to the “giveaway” includes a crypto wallet address, instructions to send funds to verify your own address, and a promise that you’ll get twice as much or more back.
Scammers keep all the cryptocurrency they’re sent as part of the supposed address verification and never send anything back. Since cryptocurrency transactions are irreversible, the victims have no way to recover the funds they send
If you own cryptocurrency, or you’re planning to buy some, it’s imperative that you know how to protect yourself. When you send your cryptocurrency to another wallet, it’s gone. There’s no way to dispute the transaction and get it reversed. Cryptocurrency doesn’t have the safeguards of traditional financial products, like credit cards or bank accounts.
Never send cryptocurrency to any unknown wallet addresses. Only transfer cryptocurrency to your own wallet or to someone else if you personally know the recipient. Make sure you have the correct wallet address, as well. Any mistake could result in your transfer being sent to the wrong place and lost forever.
Understand too, what you should and shouldn’t be sharing about your crypto assets. You wouldn’t give out a credit card number, address, and security code to a random website, nor should you be giving out details of your crypto holdings.
Remember that if your credit card gets hit with a scam, you usually have an ally in the financial institutions backing your card. That’s not the case with crypto. Don’t get fooled by crypto giveaways, no matter who announces them. It’s OK to be skeptical, and if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. The fact that hackers were able to share a scam through O’Leary’s Twitter account is another sign of how careful you have to be.