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- Utah representative’s twitter account compromised
- The account is promoting crypto scams
- Twitter scams aren’t slowing down
It was discovered that Utah representative Mike Winder’s account has been compromised when the username was changed to that of Tesla’s founder, Elon Musk.
A scam was being promoted using the account.
Apparently, Musk’s name was spelt as ‘Msuk’ in order to evade detection by twitter’s bot identification software. The tweet was promoting ‘the best crypt-event’. The ‘e’ in message was not spelt in US or UK English; it was a character that looked like the letter e. Also, crypto was not spelt correctly; it was spelt as ‘crypt.’ the spam link included ‘merge’ in the wording.
Elon Musk and Tesla have some of the largest shares in cryptocurrencies including Doge coin, Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Similar scams were seen in replies to popular accounts associated with cryptocurrency. For example, Mike Winklemann, (aka Beeple) who is a digital artist; and Binance exchange.
Musk wanted to acquire twitter because of the social media giant’s alleged failure to effectively deal with bots. He pulled out of the deal which was struck for $44 billion, citing twitter failure to disclose the exact number of fake and spam accounts on the site.
Accounts of popular personalities are hacked because of the high number of followers those accounts have. Those accounts are then used to dupe people into opening unverified or illegitimate websites.
Unfortunately, sometimes, even verified accounts get hacked. For instance, around the time of the Ethereum’s Merge – both before and after the Merge – multiple verified accounts impersonating Vitalik Buterin’s account promoted spams associated with Ether
A verified account on twitter can be identified by the blue tick on the account’s profile. Unverified accounts have no distinct, standard mark on the account profile. A blue tick is visible if the account is verified, whether the account is private or public.
Recently, actor Will Lasso’s account was hacked by scammers; they impersonated Input Output Hong Kong CEO and Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson.
Steve Anderson is an Australian crypto enthusiast. He is a specialist in management and trading for over 5 years. Steve has worked as a crypto trader, he loves learning about decentralisation, understanding the true potential of the blockchain.
