New most retweeted tweet ever resembles typical online scam

ByCraig Haley

The much coveted honour of most retweeted Tweet ever has a new owner from today as a Japanese billionaire smashes the previous Twitter record with a tweet that – in almost all other contexts – would look very much like a scam.

The previous most retweeted tweet, which held the record from April 2017, was posted by Carter Wilkerson and had asked fast food outlet Wendys how many retweets he would need to get a lifetime supply of chicken nuggets. Before that, Ellen DeGeneres held the record since 2014 with the Oscars selfie.

But now the record has been crushed with Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa’s tweet soon accumulating over five million retweets (the previous record was a comparatively mere 3.6 million.) But Maezawa’s tweet did offer something its competition did not; money for sharing it.

The tweet which accumulated over 5 million retweets in only a few days.

We always drill in to our readers that if a social media post offers you a chance to win a large prize – or a large amount of money – just for clicking share (or retweet) then you’re almost certainly looking at a scam, since this is a typical method used by spammers and crooks to make their posts go viral.

However the exception to this golden rule, in this case, appears to be when billionaires tweet out posts from their official blue ticked Twitter account claiming to offer 100m Yen ($900,00, £725,00) between 100 randomly selected users who hit retweet.


Sponsored Content. Continued below...




The post appears to be a celebratory post concerning his website Zozotown, which apparently made 10bn Yen in sales over Christmas.

A tweet offering money to those that retweet it is unusual move, though there is no doubt it’s ultimately just pocket change to Maezawa who found his fortune in the fashion world.

But alas, be on the lookout – while this particular tweet may be the real deal – it really is a one in a billion post. The vast majority of posts claiming to offer money or large prizes for retweets or shares are going to be fake, and no doubt scammers are going to be using Maezawa’s real tweet to add authenticity to their own posts. Consider yourself warned.

Keep up-to-date with all the latest cybersecurity threats and our tips to stay safe online. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Continued below...


Thanks for reading! But before you go… as part of our latest series of articles on how to earn a little extra cash using the Internet (without getting scammed) we have been looking into how you can earn gift vouchers (like Amazon vouchers) using reward-per-action websites such as SwagBucks. If you are interested we even have our own sign-up code to get you started. Want to learn more? We discuss it here. (Or you can just sign-up here and use code Nonsense70SB when registering.)

Become a Facebook Supporter. For 0.99p (~$1.30) a month you can become a Facebook fan, meaning you get an optional Supporter Badge when you comment on our Facebook posts, as well as discounts on our merchandise. You can subscribe here (cancel anytime.)