A number of high-level Twitter accounts have been compromised in an ongoing Bitcoin scam. As reported, accounts belonging to Bill Gates, Kanye West, Elon Musk and more individuals were hacked. This also includes accounts of companies like Apple and Uber that were used by the hackers to tweet out Bitcoin scams.
Kanye West’s tweet that has since been deleted read, “I am giving back to my fans. All Bitcoin sent to my address below will be sent back doubled. I am only doing a maximum of $10,000,000.”
The Bitcoin address that was given out in the tweet was identical to that by Gates’, Musk’s and Apple’s tweets.
Of course, this has shocked many as the names of the public figures that got hacked fill the trending list at the moment.
So someone gains twitter backend access and uses the accounts of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Apple, Uber etc to run a cheeky little crypto scam instead of starting World War 3.
— Jake Davis (@DoubleJake) July 15, 2020
Bill Gates, Elon, Apple accounts gets #hacked
People who saved their passwords on Google: pic.twitter.com/Ox480KgQvX
— keshsinha_ (@sobrphilosopher) July 15, 2020
A number of the people that were hacked did send out statements to make it clear that they were not the ones sending out these tweets.
The official Twitter Support account promptly responded by saying that they are aware of the issue and are investigating. This could simply go down as one of the greatest heists on the platform. This is considering all the public figures that have fallen victim and the whole mystery around it.
Given the high-profile nature of all the accounts, including Barack Obama and Joe Biden, they most likely use two-factor authentication. Therefore, the hacked tweets were most likely not the result of their passwords being figured out.
Unfortunately, it is reported that a huge number of users have fallen victim to the scam losing lots of money in the process. The hacker’s plan was to most probably use accounts that have a huge following. And considering how famous they are then the millions of followers can trust them and click on the links.
This gets even scarier if you considered how easy it would be to get accounts that are less secure.
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