Fraudsters are using Twitter bots to trick unsuspecting tweeters into making PayPal and Venmo payments to accounts under their control.
The bots appear to be activated when a legitimate user asks another for their payment information, presumably discovering these tweets via a search for keywords such as ‘PayPal’, ‘Venmo’, or other services.
They masquerade as the other user by scraping their profile picture and adopting a similar username, before supplying them with false payment information in the hopes the original tweeter will pay into this account.