Suspected bitcoin scammers have hacked Twitter accounts of major corporations and business moguls including Apple, Uber Bill Gates and Elon Musk on Wednesday in an attempt to get people to transfer cryptocurrency.
Other accounts affected were those belonging to prominent people like Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu, Tron, Justin Sun and Charlee Lee, Binance’s CEO CZ and so on.
Crypto companies and payment platforms were also affected – Coinbase, Binance, Gemini, Kraken, Gemini, Kucoin, Gate .io, Coindesk.
These accounts all tweeted links to a site claiming to be giving away bitcoin — all you had to do was send a little its way, first.
A tweet sent from the account of Gates, the software mogul and the world’s second-wealthiest person, promised to double all payments sent to his bitcoin address for the next 30 minutes.
The tweet reads;
Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time. You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000.
Replying to Gates’ tweet, the suspected scammers through Elon Musk’s account tweeted;
Jeff Bezos’ account was also not spared, as the attackers tweeted;
Cybersecurity news platform The Hacker News said the bitcoin account involved had already received nearly $100,000.
The tweets were however deleted after several minutes.
Twitter says it is investigating the issue, which Bloomberg reports to have caused 2.3% decline in post market.
People on Twitter called out the Gates tweet, and others like it from other accounts, as obvious scams.
Twitter spokeswoman Aly Pavela said the company was looking into the issue and would have more to say later.
A digital currency company, Cryptonaurio has in an interesting turn of events revealed the identity of the scammer.
This has however not been verified as at the time of filing this report.
Some of the accounts have huge followings. Gates has 51.1 million Twitter followers, while tech executive Musk has 36.9 million. Apple has 4.5 million followers.
Cryptocurrency investors and brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss said from their Twitter accounts that they believed major Twitter accounts in the industry had been compromised and were tweeting about a fake partnership.