Scammers routinely clone Twitter accounts in an attempt to fool people into making bad investment devisions or into revealing personal information. Some years ago, Twitter introduced a checkmark on accounts where the identity of the account holder was verified. Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey, says that the company is looking for a way to verify the identity of every Twitter user.
During a Periscope live stream, Dorsey revealed that the company intends to “open verification to everyone”.
He also added that the purpose of the checkmark, which is to establish identity, is often misunderstood with some people believing it implied credibility.
There have been a number of recent scams involving cloned Twitter accounts. In particular, cryptocurrency charlatans have been using cloned accounts of known cryptocurrency experts to promote ICOs and to dupe people into selling coins at lower values than they’d get on the open market.
The balancing act is on between verifying identity and protecting the anonymity of users.
Dorsey said “We have a lot of work ahead, it’s not going to be overnight. We’re going to be as open as we can. That’s going to be uncomfortable for us in many ways, but we want to be very open and very vulnerable with you all about what we’re facing and what our challenges are”.