Major Twitter account scam uses high-profile handles to scam people for Bitcoin

On Wednesday afternoon, a dozen or so major Twitter accounts were compromised in an organized attack that scammed unsuspecting people out of tens of thousands of dollars in Bitcoin.

The event began at around 4PM Eastern time and lasted for about two hours, during which compromised accounts with millions of followers Tweeted various “feeling generous” scam posts. This is when followers are encouraged to send an amount of money to a specified address with promise they would receive double the amount back. Spoiler alert, nobody gets money back.

Messages were sent from the compromised accounts of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Cash App, Apple, Wiz Khalifa, Warren Buffet, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, Barack Obama, MrBeast, Floyd Mayweather, and XXXTentacion. Even crypto accounts of Gemini, Coinbase, Biance, and Coindesk were affected.

Here are some of the Tweets, all of which seem to direct to the same Bitcoin address with the premise that they’d receive double the money you sent.

Most if not all these accounts were Twitter verified, and between them they shared tens of millions of followers. Twitter acknowledged the attack less than two hours after it began and offered the following statement.

We are aware of a security incident impacting accounts on Twitter. We are investigating and taking steps to fix it. We will update everyone shortly.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 15, 2020

Twitter then temporarily disabled all verified accounts from sending Tweets to stop the attack.

We’re continuing to limit the ability to Tweet, reset your password, and some other account functionalities while we look into this. Thanks for your patience.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 15, 2020

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey promises that it will offer a report of what happened once the Twitter team has a better understanding of it.

Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.

We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.

💙 to our teammates working hard to make this right.

— jack (@jack) July 16, 2020

According to Motherboard, the alleged culprit is an internal Twitter administrative tool that was supposedly used. Screenshots of this tool (shared around on Twitter) showed hackers how to take advantage of this tool. Twitter has since taken down these screenshots.

We are really looking forward to hearing what Twitter finds.

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