One of the biggest hacks in history has been going down in the last few hours after the Twitter accounts of some of the most famous people in the world were hacked and a message was posted asking people to donate to a Bitcoin wallet, telling them that whatever they sent over to it would be returned and doubled.
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Elon Musk, Kanye West, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Apple, Jeff Bezos and more were all targeted by the scammers in what is being called one of the most widespread and confounding hacks the platform has ever seen. Even though the tweets were spotted fairly quickly and deleted, the accounts kept posting them and presumably more and more people kept depositing Bitcoin into the wallet address.
At the time of writing, it appears that about $110,000 worth of Bitcoin has been deposited in the wallet, but bizarrely whoever is behind the scam seems to be doubling it and sending it back to people as the daily final balance seems to be fluctuating up and down. Weird – although maybe they’re just doing this to make it look legit to anyone else thinking of donating? Seems kinda pointless
It’s an actual wallet address and there are transactions happening. It’s unclear if these transactions are legit. Scammers often seed their own scams to give them the appearance of authenticity. https://t.co/GUHEDaKNxu pic.twitter.com/xfhl3817xr
— Ryan Mac 🙃 (@RMac18) July 15, 2020
Either way we’re not really sure what’s going on right now and we might never find out given how shady the internet can be. If you’re thinking about donating to that Bitcoin link though my advice would be just to straight up not do that. It’s not a good idea.
Twitter actually took the unprecedented step of preventing everyone with a blue tick from tweeting for three hours last night whilst they sorted it out which I don’t think has ever happened in their history before. It seems to all be under control now, with Twitter saying that someone got access to their internal tools interface to allow this to happen. That’s all they’re saying right now, or maybe ever who knows?
For more of the same, check out this dark secret behind Bitcoin that should have us all worried. Back from 2017.
