The Twitter accounts of Billionaires, Bill Gates and Elon Musk were apparently hacked on Wednesday by scammers promoting crypto scams.Bill Gates and Elon Musk Twitter accounts hacked
The attack also targeted accounts belonging to CoinDesk, Binance, Ripple, Gemini, and other figures who are well-known in the cryptocurrency world.
Some of the messages were removed soon after being posted, with executives of affected companies tweeting out warnings not to fall for the scams.
The Tesla CEO’s account issued a mysterious tweet this afternoon reading,
“I‘m feeling generous because of Covid-19. I’ll double any BTC payment sent to my BTC address for the next hour. Good luck, and stay safe out there!” The tweet also contained a bitcoin address, presumably one associated with the hacker’s crypto wallet.
The tweet was then deleted and replaced by another one more plainly laying out the fake promotion.
“Feeling grateful doubling all payments sent to my BTC address! You send $1,000, I send back $2,000! Only doing this for the next 30 minutes,” it read before also getting deleted.
The tweet posted to Gates’ account echoed the last Musk tweet, with an identical BTC address attached. It was also deleted shortly after posting.
It is not clear how the hackers were able to gain access to top profile accounts, even the ones that are locked with 2FA.
Co-founder of Gemini, Cameron Winklevoss, whose company’s Twitter was also compromised by the hackers, said they are investigating the crime.
He wrote on Twitter:
ALL MAJOR CRYPTO TWITTER ACCOUNTS HAVE BEEN COMPROMISED.
2FA / strong password was used for @Gemini
account. We are investigating and hope to have more information shortly.
