Musk, Obama, Biden, Bezos, Gates—bitcoin scam hits Twitter in coordinated blitz

reader comments

267 with 183 posters participating, including story author

Twitter accounts of the rich and famous—including Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Joe Biden—were simultaneously hijacked on Wednesday and used to push cryptocurrency scams.

As of 3:58pm California time, one wallet address used to receive victim’s digital coin had received more than $118,000, though it wasn’t clear all of it came from people who fell for the scam. The bitcoin came from 356 transactions that all occurred over about a four-hour span on Tuesday. The wallet address appeared in tweets from at least 15 accounts—some with tens of millions of followers—that promoted fraudulent incentives to transfer money. At least one other Bitcoin wallet was used in the mass scam.

“I’m giving back to all my followers,” one now-deleted tweet from Musk’s account said. “I am doubling all payments sent to the Bitcoin address below. You send 0.1 BTC, I send 0.2 BTC back!” A tweet from the Bezos account said the same thing. “Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time,” a Gates tweet said. “I am doubling all payments sent to my BTC address for the next 30 minutes. You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000.”

Another variation of the scam promoted a partnered initiative that pledged to donate 5,000 BTC to the community and included a domain link to send money. The domain was quickly suspended. This variation came early in the hijacking spree and appeared to affect only cryptocurrency-related businesses, including Binance and Gemini.

Other hijacked accounts belonged to Barack Obama,

Continue reading – Article source