In this week’s edition of You Can’t Make This Up, Lol, the Twitter accounts of a number of high profile and celebrity users – including Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Apple, Uber, and others – were jacked last night to promote a totally obvious crypto scam with spelling mistakes and everything, and over 300 people got duped.
Fake accounts pushing crypto scams isn’t exactly a new thing on social media, but this was different – instead of compromising accounts one by one, the hackers used “coordinated social engineering” to bamboozle Twitter employees with administrative account access, according the company.
Bitcoin transaction records are public, so you can count them for yourself – 376 transactions, totalling about $115,000 at current exchange rates. Bitcoin transactions are also not reversible.
In response, verified “blue tick” Twitter accounts were temporarily suspended, but are now being restored at publish time.