Twitter Accounts Of Many Famous Companies, Politicians And Celebrities Hacked To Promote Bitcoin Scam

16/07/2020

Twitter is where people can rapidfire their opinions and thoughts, so others can hear. This makes Twitter one of the few places on the social media sphere where speech really matters.

As a result, this is one of the main reasons why politicians, celebrities and businesses use Twitter on a daily basis to express what they want others to listen, and influence followers to do what they want them to do.

And this time, things go bizarre when many of those accounts from prominent companies and individuals were illicitly hacked to promote a Bitcoin scam to their millions of followers.

The incident is considered the most widespread Twitter hack the web has ever seen.

"We are aware of a security incident impacting accounts on Twitter," the messaging service said in a tweet.

"We are investigating and taking steps to fix it. We will update everyone shortly."

'Twitter hacked'
Some of the famous hacked accounts from companies and famous individuals tweeting Bitcoin scams. (Credit: 'These Nudes Do Not Exist')

The accounts affected, and not limited to:

  • Barack Obama.
  • Elon Musk.
  • Apple.
  • Joe Biden.
  • Bill Gates.
  • Wiz Khalifa.
  • Warren Buffet.
  • Uber.
  • Jeff Bezos.
  • MrBeast.
  • Floyd Mayweather.
  • ‘God’ (@TheTweetOfGod).
  • Mike Bloomberg.
  • XXXTentacion.
  • Kim Kardashian.
  • CoinDesk.
  • Gemini.
  • Gate.io.
  • Cash App.
  • Binance.
  • CZ_Binance.
  • Tron.
  • Justin Sun.
  • Ripple.
  • Charlie Lee.
  • Coinbase.
  • And more.

The first thing Twitter did, was disabling the ability for validated 'blue checkmarked' accounts to tweet.

"You may be unable to Tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident," Twitter's support team said in a post.

Twitter, and the owner of the accounts, then slowly deleted the scam posts that told people they had 30 minutes to send $1,000 in Bitcoin in order to be sent back twice as much.

All of the tweets featured the same Bitcoin address.

While some companies, politicians and famous celebrities posted blatantly, several accounts related to major cryptocurrency companies featured fake tweets announcing a partnership with an organization called ‘Crypto for Health’, which was also a scam.

Making things worse, the hackers somehow managed to fully hijack their victims' accounts by changing the emails associated with some of the accounts.

Twitter later tweeted that it detected what it believes to be a "coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools."

"We’ve taken significant steps to limit access to internal systems and tools while our investigation is ongoing. More updates to come as our investigation continues," the company added.

Because of this incident, Twitter lost $1 billion from its market cap.

And given that the hackers managed to get away with more than a hundred thousand dollars with the scam, and also because the case is affecting more than a hundred prominent individuals and companies, the FBI confirmed that it is investigating the incident:

"The FBI is investigating the incident involving several Twitter account belonging to high profile individuals that occurred July 15, 2020. At this time, the accounts appear to have been compromised in order to perpetuate cryptocurrency fraud. We advise the public not to fall victim to this scam by sending cryptocurrency or money in relation to this incident. As this investigation is ongoing, we will not be making further comment at this time."