If ever there were evidence that cryptocurrency has hit the American culture mainstream, it’s this: Verified Twitter accounts were hacked in a scam attempt encouraging users to send bitcoin with a promise of greater wealth.
The Twitter hack changed their profiles to “SNL” and advertised a website where the cryptocurrency would be given away.
If it sounds too good to be true … you know the rest.
The spam attack coincides with Saturday night’s Elon Musk-hosted airing of the iconic NBC show Saturday Night Live.
The Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder has been among the more prominent business leaders to lean on bitcoin (Tesla purchased $1.5 billion in bitcoin earlier this year) as well as stirring interest in the meme-inspired Dogecoin.
Among the accounts were Jorge Taiana, an Argentine senator with more than 100,000 followers.
But the warnings went out in a hurry, led by the fraud tracking site @MalwareHunterTeam and its 121,000 followers.
In a series of tweets/warnings on Saturday morning, @MalwareHunterTeam provided solid evidence — screenshots of verified accounts that seemed to have been taken over – and wrote on each: “Another verified account is being used to spread SNL / Musk themed scam.”
Instructions sent from those hacked accounts to their followers included telling people to “join” a website that would distribute 5,000 bitcoin.
Images hosted by Medium show Musk in a tuxedo. The posts ask users to send “from 0.02 to 5 BTC to the address below and get from .20 to 50 BTC back!”
A post by an altered account said 100 million Dogecoin would be distributed to users who clicked through to the bitcoin website: “We want to thank our supporters and also help crypto adoption. 100 000 000 DOGE will be distributed among everyone who takes part in this event.”
That would be too good to be true.
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