On the 15th of July 2020, hundreds of Twitter accounts that belong to prominent personalities across the globe were hacked. Some of these prominent personalities whose Twitter accounts were hacked are : Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Joe Biden and Mike Bloomberg.
Once the culprits gained access to these accounts, they used them to push a Bitcoin scam that has so far netted them over USD 100,000 in deposits. The tweets read” I am giving back to the community. All bitcoin sent to this address will be doubled. I am only doing this for 30 minutes. “Attached to these messages was a BTC address.
The scam seemed to target prominent individuals who had more than one million followers. However, similar tweets were also posted in hundreds of unverified accounts. It is still not clear whether this was part of the coordinated attack or these accounts had also been compromised. Twitter responded by disabling all the affected accounts from tweeting.
Since the attack,there have been over 300 transactions recorded on the posted address. Recent reports say that the hackers manage to get access to twitter employee logins on slack and that is how they managed to infiltrate the whole system. It is perceived that these hackers are young, probably in the mid twenties.
How are they planning to cash out
Latest news state that over 300 people were duped in this scam and sent btc to the hackers’ address. This may not be that high looking at the total number of accounts that had been compromised and their global influence. The single largest transaction that was sent to this address came from Asia and was about USD 42,000.
About 22% of these funds have now been moved to a wasabi wallet- a special wallet that promotes fund- anonymity. It hides transaction details and makes it difficult for funds to be traced.
Authorities believe that once the funds have been channeled to a wasabi wallet, the next step will be to transfer them to an exchange.
Twitter is still conducting investigations on this issue and have stated they will share all details once the investigations are over
