Bitcoin scam decoded How hackers swindled of more than 80 lakh from Twitter users

Bitcoin scam decoded: How hackers swindled more than 80 lakh from Twitter users

 What's the scam?

    Hackers broke into high-profile Twitter accounts and send fake tweets offering $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address.

For instance, the message sent from Elon Must's account said "All bitcoins sent to my address below will be sent back double the amount. If you send $1,000 i will send back $2,000 Likewise information spread from Bill Gates Twitter handle said: "Everyone is asking me to give back and now is this time. I am doubling all payment sent to my BTC address for the next 30 minutes. You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000."

What expect say?

    Arjun Vijay, Co-Founder and COO, Giottus Cryptocurrency Exchange, said these kinds of scam have happened in the past. But never at this scale it was a well-coordinated attack, where multiple account got hacked at the same time, with the same tweets directing users to the same scam site. Unfortunately, more than 350 users fell for the scam globally, losing an estimate of Rs 89 lakh before Twitter stepped in to remove the tweets."

What teach you?

    There are no free lunches and no easy money, As an investor, you should always doubt information or schemes that offer to you an opportunity to make quick money in a very short period.

"Hackers had complete access to Twitter. They could post anything from any account. But they chose to seek bitcoins through false promises. People should be more careful. Most crypto giveaways that ask for contributions are scams. We hope this bring awareness, and Twitter users do not fall under this kind of scams" said Vijay.

Twitter and its Security

    Twitter is an American micro blogging and social networking services on which users post and interact with messages knows as "tweets". In a series of tweets, Twitter said it believes the incident was a "coordinated social engineering attack" that targeted some of its employees with access to internal systems and tools. They were then used to take control of many high-profiles and verified accounts and tweet from those.

The social media service firm also said it immediately locked down the affected accounts and removed the tweets posed by the attackers. It also temporarily blocked verified users from tweeting while the company investigated the issue.

Crypto expect Benson Samuel told ETMarkets.com that these types of scams happened from time to time. it has more to do with security of users' Twitter accounts.

"when the crypto boom started, a lot of people hacked accounts and asked others to send bitcoins to anonymous accounts. One should not pay attention to such tweets or information, "he said.