An Elon Musk impersonator successfully hacked the Twitter account of one of the biggest film studios in Europe, using the platform to steal $38,000 worth of Bitcoin.
As reported by The Next Web, the cyber thief managed to gain access to Pathé’s Twitter profile, and rapidly transformed the account in an effort to trick people into thinking it was the official account of entrepreneur Elon Musk.
In a classic crypto Twitter scheme, the hacker then asked people on Twitter to send Bitcoin to a wallet address, and promised to send back twice the amount in return. Despite the sloppy nature of the attempt and the faux “Elon Musk” thanking the Tesla community for their “suppoot,” the scheme appears to have worked, with the spurious wallet address receiving more than 6 BTC in 24 hours.
Pathé has since regained access to its account and removed the malicious tweets. It now says everything is back to normal.
https://twitter.com/patheuk/status/1059482565269209088
Twitter is notorious for these types of “crypto giveaway” schemes. For months, scam artists on Twitter have impersonated celebrities and major figures in the tech industry, trying to trick people into handing over their crypto.
The social media giant has stepped up its efforts to stop scammers, banning hundreds of accounts for engaging in “coordinated manipulation.”
Since our initial suspensions last Tuesday, we have continued our investigation, further building our understanding of these networks. In addition, we suspended an additional 486 accounts for violating the policies outlined last week. This brings the total suspended to 770.
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) August 27, 2018
Elon Musk himself has joked about how convincing the now notorious scammers can be.
Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin has also chimed in, and was the first to change his Twitter name in an effort to try to stop people from handing over their hard-earned cryptocurrency.
I want to know who is running the Etherium scambots! Mad skillz …
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 8, 2018
I do wish @elonmusk's first tweet about ethereum was about the tech rather than the twitter scambots……..@jack help us please? Or someone from the ETH community make a layer 2 scam filtering solution, please? https://t.co/biVRshZmne
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) July 9, 2018
The Crypto Beat
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