Bitcoin News: Scammers or fraudsters often target the gullibility of someone to lure them into their malicious schemes. Falling prey to the hackers ill intentions, multiple high-profile Twitter accounts including Google, Under Armour and Target has become victim to a string of cryptocurrency-related hackings. The attackers hack such Twitter account and invite their followers to participate in a Bitcoin giveaway scam.
Bitcoin scammers successfully managed to hack several major Twitter verified accounts to lure the loyal list of their respective followers into a false bitcoin giveaway scheme. The trust factor these accounts have earned over the years in the users, along with the lucrative offer of making some profits, enables the scammers to fool around with innocent investors.
Target
Unsuspected users saw an ad in their timelines as a promoted tweet, that stated that Target would be handing out 5,000 bitcoins in “the biggest crypto-giveaway in the world.” This tweet further invited users to deposit a small portion of bitcoins in receive for a large sum in return.
A similar scam was performed on the account of Elon Musk. The hacker simply gained accessed to verified Twitter accounts, played around to impersonate Musk, to tweet an ad that would appear on timelines of unsuspecting Twitter users.’
As for the target account, the scammer managed to send out a promoted tweet and reply to the tweet with several other hacked verified accounts that provided their false ad with an air of legitimacy.
The list of compromised accounts includes Universal Music Czech Republic, the Body Shop, the University of Toledo’s Athletics Department, and Under Armour Baseball Japan. Comments like “Yes, this is a good innovation, thanks for distributing bitcoins!”, were published on Target’s tweet. Notably, the scammers stepped up their game by forging a comment from the United Nations Refugee Agency in Serbia stating “Great innovation, now I can pay for my purchases using Bitcoin, thank you Target.com!”
Reportedly, the company confirmed that the tweet remained on its feed for approximately half an hour. Though it was soon deleted, the ad managed to gain over 80 retweets and 490 likes before its removal.
Notably, the time difference between the Target and the Google hack wasn’t much, just mere hours.
The official G Suite Twitter account advertised the following message to hundreds of thousands of users: (The screenshot was shared by Ernst Mulders with thenextweb.com
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