Cybercriminals executed the crime through the Twitter account of an Argentine senator. These criminals promoted a supposed 5,000 BTC giveaway.
After the appearance of billionaire Elon Musk on the legendary American program Saturday Night Live (SNL), scammers took advantage of various verified Twitter accounts in which they promoted false gifts, managing to steal USD 100,000 in cryptocurrencies.
Among the crypto assets that the hackers acquired due to the scam are bitcoin (BTC), ether, Ethereum’s native cryptocurrency and, Musk’s favorite, dogecoin.The scammers made at least $ 40,840 worth of BTC; $ 13,758 in ETH and $ 42,457 in DOGE.
The tactic used by the cybercriminals on this occasion was to access verified Twitter accounts and change the names of those accounts also to “SNL”, using the fact that Musk was going to play a role in the tv show. The scammers left the existing Twitter identifiers and the proper biographies.
The criminals then proceeded to send messages asking their possible victims for small amounts of cryptocurrencies, to verify their addresses and, in turn, guarantee a profit 10 times greater than the current inversion.
Among the accounts that the criminals stole was that of the Argentine senator, Jorge Taiana. The account is currently active but the sweepstakes posts, as well as the profile picture, were removed.
The Criminals Promoted a 5,000 BTC Giveaway in the Name of The Tesla CEO
This kind of scam has been going on for a long time, people lose millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies daily, and there are still no real signs of concern from Twitter. It is not the first time that criminals take advantage of the image of Elon Musk to scam through the microblogging social network.
In 2020, the official Twitter accounts of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance and its founder, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), were hacked, as well as that of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, that of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, that of the former president of the United States, Barack Obama, to offer 5,000 BTC.
It is important to consider that a magnate like Elon Musk or Bill Gates will hardly give away bitcoin or money through social networks. So those “gifts” are often a scam that usually relates to other criminal procedures, like phishing.
This is a technique that consists of impersonating an authority, company, or someone else, to trick the victim and force them to reveal their confidential information.
The Cryptocurrency Boom Meme
Like Dogecoin, other meme cryptocurrencies have experienced a big momentum in recent days. Such is the case of Australian Safe Shepherd (ASS), which in the last day had an increase in its value with 1,143%, which is still a very low price and adheres to the increase in market volume with more than 3,000%, according to CoinMarketCap.
Dogelon Mars (ELON) also joined this list, a token that grew almost 500% in price. Users also talk about Shiba Inu, the main competitor of Dogecoin that multiplied by seven its value after finding a spot in the exchanges Binance, KuCoin, and Huobi.
By: Jenson Nuñez
