Twitter advertisement falsely claiming Sunrise host David Koch had died and the scam crypto website it is promoting (Image: Twitter, Supplied)

Australian Twitter users were shocked to see posts eulogising local breakfast television legend David Koch late last week.

Accompanying a black-and-white image of the Sunrise host looking distraught, user @kimberly_ramrez delicately tweeted to her several hundred followers that “although saying goodbye is never easy, we take comfort in knowing that Kochie lived a full and meaningful life, leaving behind a legacy of kindness, warmth and compassion”.

But despite not appearing on Sunrise last week, Koch is not dead. He tweeted last week that he is alive and was in Adelaide for the AFL’s Gather Round. 

The tweet claiming Koch’s death was, it appears, an advertisement that used a hacked account to coax users to sign up for a scam cryptocurrency service in return for a finder’s fee. 

Before being deleted Monday morning, @kimberly_ramrez’s tweet had been viewed more than 140,000 times. Crikey was able to contact the owner of the account, Kimberly Ramirez, who said that her Twitter account had been hacked.

“I had no idea this was happening. I had deleted the app off my phone for a while and forgot about it,” she said in an email.

The NY-based advertising worker said that her account had been accessed by someone from Lake Forest, Illinois, according to a login attempt email sent to the address associated with her account. The user then changed the account’s password and started advertising on Twitter using her account. 

“This a**hole left me a debt of over $1k on ads,” she said.

More than 6000 people had clicked on the advertisements, which had been targeted at users in the United States and in Australia. Ramirez said she had deleted the advertisements after being contacted by Crikey. 

One of the other ads featured what appears to be an artificially generated image of Koch being manhandled as television crews watch behind, accompanied by the text: “His whole future is now in jeopardy! Is this the end of his business career?” 

An artificially generated image of David Koch in a Twitter ad (Image: Supplied)
An artificially generated image of David Koch in a Twitter ad (Image: Supplied)

All of the ads included links to the domain kitchensandcountertopsdirect.com, a website for a Massachusetts-based kitchen remodelling service. 

While some users who clicked the link were directed to that company’s website, others were redirected to a fake ABC News article hosted on the domain MuskNews.net about Koch promoting “a new cryptocurrency auto-trading program, Immediate Edge” in an interview with The Project’s Waleed Aly. Needless to say, this interview never occurred and Koch has never endorsed this program.

All the page’s links direct the user to a website advertising Immediate Edge. Social media posts show other people complaining about similar advertisements promoting Immediate Edge featuring public figures such as Jeremy Clarkson, Piers Morgan and Justin Trudeau.

Immediate Edge is a “get rich quick” scam. The internet is littered with complaints from people who’ve signed up for the service with the promise of great returns, deposited hundreds or thousands of dollars, and then could not withdraw their money. 

Cryptocurrency scam monitor website ScamCryptoRobots.com author Stephan Lindburg wrote this month about their tactics.

“In most cases the brokers will try to use various stall tactics by having you resend documents, or alternatively use a variety of excuses saying the risk manager is indisposed. In other cases they will simply choose not to reply to your emails and you will eventually get locked out of your trading account,” he said. 

So why are people purportedly hacking a small US-based user’s account to share a link to a scam website? Posts on affiliate marketing websites are offering US$720 for each user they’re able to sign up for Immediate Edge. This means that anyone who can convince others to sign up for Immediate Edge — using, say, fake celebrity endorsements — can quickly pocket thousands of dollars even if they have nothing to do with the company itself. 

The MuskNews.net domain that hosted the fake ABC News article also hosts two other fake news articles, both purportedly published by Forbes, which promote similar affiliate schemes. 

The decentralised nature of these scam affiliate ads is one of the reasons why it’s difficult to stamp them out individually. Even if you ban one user from a platform, there’s nothing stopping any other user from promoting the same service (or even the same user evading the ban). 

But some are trying to take action by holding the platforms that serve the advertisements accountable. After Australian businessman Andrew Forrest began running a public campaign about Facebook hosting cryptocurrency ads featuring his fake endorsement, the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission launched legal proceedings last year against Meta for engaging in false, misleading or deceptive conduct by allowing the ads to run on its platform.

But when Crikey contacted Twitter about what the company was doing to stop serving spam ads, the company’s press email address automatically responded with a poo emoji.