Twitter is under the limelight again with the latest Bitcoin scam that led to various high-profile accounts being hacked. On Wednesday, multiple accounts of celebrities and brands were hacked on twitter and sent out tweets promoting cryptocurrency giveaways.
The fake giveaway required users to send ‘x’ amount of bitcoin to a specified bitcoin wallet and promised users that the amount will be doubled and return to the users. Each account that was hacked included the same message format and had the same bitcoin wallet address.
This has been one of the largest twitter scams in terms of scale and reaches on the platform. There were several verified profiles that were hacked, some of them include:
- Bill Gates
- Apple
- Elon Musk
- Jeff Bezos
- Warren Buffet
- Floyd Mayweather
- Barack Obama
- Kanye West
- Joe Biden
- Uber
Since it was harder to identify the scam at the beginning, users did send out money to the address. Since the exchanges are listed publicly on the bitcoin network, it was easy to see all the transactions being transferred to the bitcoin wallet address mentioned in the tweets.
It is estimated that more than $110,000 were transferred within the first hour. And these transactions cannot be reversed.
In response to the hack, Twitter mentioned that this was a coordinated attack that targeted employees of the platform to gain access to internal systems and tools. These hackers took control of multiple high profiles and verified accounts.
They also added that significant steps were taken that limited the access to their internal systems and tools and they are still investigating the matter. Earlier the platform blocked most of these verified accounts from tweeting altogether, but as of today, the accounts can now tweet again.
