Verified accounts are being hacked by threat actors in an Elon Musk cryptocurrency giveaway scam that has recently become widely active. However, there is nothing new or alarming about this scam or for that matter any Twitter scam pretending to be giveaways from Elon Musk.
In 2018, $180,000 was raked in by scammers using the same kinds of giveaway schemes on Twitter.
Earlier this month, researchers had noticed an uptick in verified Twitter accounts hacked in a scam promoting another fake Elon Musk cryptocurrency giveaway.
To promote their scam where Elon Musk is allegedly giving away free cryptocurrency, these accounts will simply reply to tweets like Elon Musks below.
A link that redirects the users to a medium article promoting the fake giveaway is included in the tweet. Further links to the scams landing pages are included in the medium article. The landing pages state, if you send bitcoins to the listed address, they will send you back twice the amount.
Some of the hacked accounts are also using Tyler Winklevoss of Gemini Exchange, while most of these tweets are using Elon Musk as their theme.
So far it has been noticed that most of the accounts hacked for this scam have been dormant without activity from the owner. Although, it seemed that one of the accounts was active for 2-3 days, however, it seemed that its last activities were not from the original owner.
Account verification was disabled by Twitter after the company was hacked in a massive cryptocurrency scam. Evidently, verified accounts are in high demand for threat actors.
Dormant verified accounts are likely targets of threat actors since the hacks are not to be detected by the owner of the accounts.
$580K in a Week
This scam has brought a lot of success for the threat actors.
Researchers from the cryptocurrency addresses collected from landing pages the threat actors have earned $587,000 in bitcoin.
The Ethereum giveaway scams did not do as well, only generating $2,700 for the scammers.
It is possible that some would have been more successful in scamming people out of their assets, there are many landing pages associated with this scam.
It’s important to understand that none of the above-mentioned verified accounts will send you cryptocurrency and that all these giveaways are scams.
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