Bluesky Clouded by Scammers as Social Platform’s Popularity Grows

Bluesky’s rising popularity in the social media space is not without growing pains.

The platform, seen as an alternative to Twitter/X, now has close to 25 million users, NBC News reported Sunday (Dec. 22), citing data from ClearSky. But with this new success, the report added, comes troubles in the form of an increasing number of scammers and other bad actors.

“Over the past few weeks, there has been a rapid increase in scam activity,” Sean Gallagher, a principal threat researcher for the cybersecurity firm Sophos, told NBC.  

He added that many of these fraudsters are carrying out romance and “pig butchering” scams following the same tactics seen on other social media platforms: pretending to be romantic prospects to attract victims they can bilk out of their money.

Thus far Bluesky “has been aggressive in shutting down fraudulent accounts,” Gallagher said, and seems to respond well to people reporting suspicious accounts.

One of the company’s challenges is in account verification, something that’s unique to the platform. Bluesky treats each account as a website and lets anyone who owns a web domain register a Bluesky account using that URL. So rather than verifying users’ identity individually, Bluesky permits anyone with an official website to verify themselves and other users.

“We are getting feedback that some people are finding it too technically challenging, because people are just used to usernames. So the question is whether through enough user education, etc., we can meet those needs through domain verification, or if we have to add other aspects in addition to that,” Aaron Rodericks, Bluesky’s head of trust and safety, told NBC.

He added that while his company has witnessed scammers and other issues, they’re still not at the scale seen on other major social media platforms. 

“There’s things that come with hundreds of millions of users, in terms of harms, that we’re not seeing yet,” Rodericks said.

The news comes in the closing days of a year in which scams became the leading form of fraud plaguing financial institutions (FIs) and their customers, ahead of digital payment fraud, as PYMNTS wrote earlier this month.

The share of scam-related fraud increased by 56%, and financial losses from scams rose 121%, according to the report. Scams now make up for 23% of all fraudulent transactions, with most losses coming from relationship/trust and product/service scams. These scams trick people into permitting fraudulent transactions, often using deceptive tactics.