Fake Elon Musk Twitter Bitcoin Scam Earned 180K in One Day

A widespread scam pretending to be from ElonMusk and utilizing a stream of hacked Twitter accounts andfake giveaway sites has earned scammers over 28 bitcoins or approximately $180,000 in a single day. This scam is being pulled off by attackers hacking into verified Twitter accounts and then changing the profile name to ‘Elon Musk’. They then tweet out that he, being Elon, is creating the biggest crypto-giveaway of 10,000 bitcoins.

I left the post of director of Tesla, thank you all for your support! Even worse, these posts are being promoted through Twitteradvertising in order to give them wider visibility and to add legitimacy. The sites that thesefake profiles are promoting include musk[.]plus, musk[.]fund, and spacex[.]plus, which state that all a user has to do is send .1 or 3 BTC to the listen address in order to get 1-30 times in bitcoins back.

The sickening part is that in a single day, these scammers have received 392 transactions to the bitcoin address1KAGE12gtYVfizicQSDQmnPHYfA29bu8Da for a total of 28 bitcoins or approximately $180,000 USD. To help perpetuate the scam, the attackers hacked into official government Twitter accounts such as the Ministry of Transportation of Colombia and theNational Disaster Management Authorityof India. These accounts were then used to promote the scam by stating that they sent bitcoins and received more coins back.

Source: bleepingcomputer.com