Everything We Know About the Bitcoin Scam Mass Takeover of The Most Prominent Twitter Accounts

One of the largest social media accounts hacks ever took place around 10.00 PM EAT when prominent accounts were compromised with the hacker pumping a bitcoin giveaway scam associated with the ‘Crypto For Health’ organization.

The Twitter takeover went on for several hours before the situation was arrested. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in bitcoin have already been stolen following the Twitter hack.

SEE ALSOThe FBI Lists 4 Universal Crypto Scams You Need to Be Wary of Related to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Below is a list of all the high-profile and prominent accounts that got got hijacked in rapid succession:

  • Elon Musk
  • Bill Gates
  • Joe Biden
  • Barack Obama
  • Michael Bloomberg
  • Apple
  • Uber
  • Jeff Bezos
  • Kanye West
  • Kim Kardashian
  • Warren Buffet
  • Wiz Khalifa
  • MrBeast
  • Binance
  • Coinbase
  • Cash App
  • Gemini
  • Charlie Lee
  • Bitcoin.org
  • Kucoin
  • Bitfinex
  • Ripple
  • Coindesk
  • Justin Sun
  • CZ Binance
  • Tron Foundation

It took a while before Twitter deleted the pinned messages and about three hours before the accounts were restored to full functionality.

However the hacker was back again for a second and third round of attack with messages which read:

“I’m giving back to the community.

All Bitcoin sent to the address below will be sent back doubled! If you send $1, 000, I will send back $2, 000. 

Only doing this for 30 minutes

bc1qxy2kgdygjrsqtzq2n0yrf2493p83kkfjhx0wlh

Enjoy!

The hacked accounts collectively had over 140 million followers.

Twitter has put out a statement and said the hacker apparently leveraged an internal admin tool to gain access to all these high-profile accounts via a coordinated social engineering attack on employees who gave the hacker access to the tools.

Prominent and recognized authorities and media outlets took to Twitter to express their opinions on the hack which led to Bitcoin becoming a top-trending topic in the United States and other parts of the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The crypto community has reacted with mixed feelings regarding the hack with some one side expressing positive sentiments towards greater popularization of bitcoin while others see it as bad publicity for bitcoin.

 

 

https://twitter.com/naval/status/1283507218294292481

 

 

 

 

Crypto exchanges have already gone ahead and started blacklisting the accounts used siphon money from unsuspecting victims.

 

https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1283520780362321920

 

 

Binance has also put out a statement saying:

Binance has blacklisted all associated wallet addresses for withdrawals of this Twitter hacker, and we are continuing to take swift action in response to stop these scams from spreading. 

The hacker’s wallets are not associated with Binance, and we have blocked Binance wallet addresses from depositing assets into the hacker’s addresses.

It will be interesting to see how cryptocurrencies will be viewed in the next couple of days following this major incident.

 

 

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