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- 1 Eight prominent crypto Twitter accounts are hijacked and approximately $1 million have been stolen.
- 2 ZachXBT said that the majority of hijacking was carried out through SIM swapping.
Some prominent crypto Twitter accounts have fallen victim to scamming. Cole Villemain, the founder of Pudgy Penguins, Mira Murati, CTO of OpenAI, and Peter Schiff, a crypto hater, are among the important accounts that were hijacked.
Other accounts stolen include those of Steve Aoki, Dj and NFT collector, and Pete Rizzo, Bitcoin Magazine editor. The account of crypto hater Peter Schiff was hacked to post a suspicious link that promoted tokenized gold in decentralized finance.
ZachXBT Noted Many Accounts Linked With Phishing Links
On 2nd June, crypto community members raised the alarm when a phishing link was shared promoting a fake airdrop for an ERC-20 token named OPENAI from the account of Mira Murati.
Although the post was live for only an hour, it was viewed 79,600 times and retweeted 83 times. The scammers had restricted the tweets so that nobody could post warnings. Arthur Madrid, co-founder and CEO of The Sandbox, a metaverse platform, also faced the same type of account hack via a phishing link promoting the fake SAND airdrop.
These phishing scams are done by attaching malicious links to the tweets. Clicking on these links leads to fake websites that steal personal information and login credentials.
ZachXBT reported on June 9th that it had exposed many accounts linked on chains that are connected to phishing scams promoted via the recently hacked accounts. Furthermore, ZachXBT added that the same group of scammers had hijacked all eight accounts. This is evident by their addresses which are linked on a chain.
Quick Action Should Be Taken by Twitter Support
Another important thing highlighted by ZachXBT is that when scammers gain control of a Twitter account, the phishing scams are tweeted very quickly. The scammers did not wait to post the scam. Slow responses from Twitter support have resulted in greater losses. The tweets remain up for many hours and sometimes even for days. The guidance provided is to use the security key.
The recent Twitter scamming activity resulted in the loss of $1 million worth of crypto. ZachXBT revealed that most of the scams happened due to SIM Swap, while others were stolen. The activity happened over the past few weeks. Leading the investigation, it tweeted that TwitterSafety should investigate each case closely as a huge amount is stolen.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube have emerged as the major social media platforms that attracts cyber crimes. Hackers use accounts to share misleading and incorrect information.
Social media platforms have 20% more methods for scamming consumers. People have hundreds and thousands of connections, so the transfer of malware becomes very easy as it is easily transferred to a wide range of users.
Twitter Safety is taking strong steps that need to be followed as violation of certain rules will result in restricted reach of content and, in some cases, suspension of the account.
Andrew is a blockchain developer who developed his interest in cryptocurrencies while pursuing his post-graduation major in blockchain development. He is a keen observer of details and shares his passion for writing, along with coding. His backend knowledge about blockchain helps him give a unique perspective to his writing skills, and a reliable craft at explaining the concepts such as blockchain programming, languages and token minting. He also frequently shares technical details and performance indicators of ICOs and IDOs.
