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A sugar daddy says that if I want my monthly allowance of $1,000, then I need to give him my Twitter account login. I know this is a scam. However, what is the point of that? He doesn't want bank account details or anything, just my Twitter password.

Note that the Twitter account is a throwaway. There is no phone number or email attached to it, just a fake name, fake birthday, etc. The only thing I can think of is the IP address of where the account was created, but I am not sure how important that is.

Allegedly, the sugar daddy in question plans on paying through PayPal rather than via bank transfer and has "proof" of having made transfers to other people. He claims that the point is to show that I am committed, which is the dumbest reason I have ever heard.

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There are a lot of reasons they might want this. The most common ones are:

  1. A shocking number of people will use the same password for multiple accounts, including their financial accounts. If you are a scammer it's worth a shot.

  2. If they have your twitter password they can take over your twitter account and try to run scams on all your followers should you have any. Some of these scams are quite nasty: "Mom, Dad, help! I'm in NYC and I've been sexually assaulted and all my stuff stolen. Please send cash to XXXXXX. Please hurry!" Friends and relatives may see a plea for help from you and let their guard down, not wondering why on earth you are contacting them by Twitter. Alternatively, they can blackmail you. Essentially "Do as I ask or I will post content on your Twitter account that will embarrass you or make you look complicit in criminal activity".

  3. If they have your twitter password they can take over your twitter account and sell it on the black market to other scammers. Twitter accounts from real people have resale value because they help scammers get around systems that can spot crude 'bot' accounts.

If they have your twitter password they can change the password, change your profile information, change your email address, change your phone number, change your security settings, etc. You may have a difficult time getting Twitter to give you back control of your account.

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  • Is the part about the ip address important? or not rlly
    – user118548
    Aug 6 at 1:08
  • Probably not important. I don't think Twitter even makes the creation IP address available in the account profile. Every web site you every connect to gets your IP address. If this is somebody that has a personal grudge against you, given your IP address they could try and hack your computer (particularly if your computer is not behind a good firewall). But most random hackers wouldn't go to the trouble. They'd just scan all the IP addresses on a subnet and check for ones with open ports.
    – Charles E. Grant
    Aug 6 at 2:12
  • @user118548 it may be, because that's one of the signals Twitter uses to identify bot/fake accounts. Since your account has already been created and has been created by a human - it makes it pretty valuable for spammers since it will take twitter a whole lot longer, if ever, to reclassify it as a bot account.
    – littleadv
    Aug 6 at 19:12
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why does a sugar daddy want my twitter login?

They aren't a sugar daddy. They are a scammer.

They are gathering tools to be able to scam other people. Everybody they contact is either somebody to scam, or a resource to scam other people.

They need social media accounts, email accounts. They need bank accounts.

If they get your login, they will lock you out. They may also sell your username and password to other scammers to see if they can get into other accounts.

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The other answers are great and it's quite possible they just want your credentials and you'll never hear from them again. If it's truly a throw-away account with no followers for them to influence then change your password to something cryptic like Wdjs$E1!uA&gH^n4x9kk2B6E by using a free online password generator and see how this scam goes.

He claims that the point is to show that I am committed, which is the dumbest reason I have ever heard.

Obviously a Twitter account is meaningless to you but if they are playing the long-game with a true victim then it's game on.

If a victim wants their account back then they'll likely have to pay bribe money or Bitcoin.

The scammer can resort to threats by saying they have your identity and will report you for money laundering if you don't cooperate further.

A scammer has convincing ways of talking which can invoke a sunk-cost fallacy in the victim such as "Okay, if I send you my last $200 then you'll really give me my account back?"

The scammer's angle is dynamic, aggressive, persistent, and completely dependent on the victim's cooperation.

If the victim was silly enough to give them a real password but smart enough to cut off communication after seeing that it's a scam then the scammer has at least one known good password to try on other sites.

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