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I noticed that some people are giving away cash to "first 500 to re-tweet this" or something like that. Sometimes it looks legitimate, e.g., the account is verified, old, and has real messages as well. Then, there are hundreds if not thousands of accounts that look robot-like and which are definitely trying to scam people:

Today is a good day and I’m gonna be doing a $900 give away to anyone who want to be my sugar baby: First 25 people to like, retweet and follow me on will receive $900. Cash app/PayPal only. Text me on [redacted] to receive your payment

How does that scam work? Is it usual to "transfer money using reversible method - ask for prepaid gift card or legit transfer - original transfer is cancelled" type of fraud?

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    Hard to say. The setup could purely be to identify credulous targets. There's a number of directions it could go once they've got someone on the hook. – glibdud Jul 9 at 2:13
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    Or it could just be a trick to get people to promote their twitter accounts and they never intend to pay anyone. – Philipp Jul 9 at 9:25
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    A nice way to get people to sign up themself for "sugar baby" scam. They don't need to look on instagram or tiktok and write single message to one account. They get mutiple people write to THEM. – SZCZERZO KŁY Jul 9 at 10:12
  • Twitter search for "who want to be my sugar baby" does not give many results twitter.com/… When I search for wants instead of want I get few results. – Bernhard Döbler Jul 9 at 10:34
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    btw old and verified accounts get hacked all the time and used for these sort of "giveaways" – andyjv Jul 10 at 12:04
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There are a number of different ways this could go:

  • They could send you the money and then ask you to forward some on, as you suggest, only to reverse the original payment later.
  • They could "accidentally" pay you more than they promised and then ask you to send the overpayment back (same scam.)
  • They could collect your contact information and ghost you on this account, only to contact you later from other sources with an endless list of scams, now that they know you're willing to bite.
  • They could do the old-school Nigerian Prince scam, where they say you need to pay some small amount to "release the funds" or something, and they just keep asking for more and more as long as you keep playing along.
  • They could send you the money for realsies and then use the fact that they really paid you to build trust for some larger con. The prize money would likely be stolen in this scenario, but it may not. It's a common fallacy to assume that scammers are unwilling to spend some money in order to pull off the scam and get way more later. (Having worked in ad tech, I heard lots of stories of scammers paying a few thousand dollars to run an ad campaign that allowed them to draw attention to scam sites or even run malicious scripts through the ad code itself. Scamming is a business and it takes money to make money.)
  • Maybe they're just trying to build up followers and retweets so they can sell the account, or perpetrate more complex scams from an account that looks more legit for having such a follower base. (I don't really "do Twitter" but in general reselling accounts is a thing I've heard of, particularly in online gaming.)
  • I'm sure there are other possibilities besides.
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