Washington, D.C, United States of America — In an apparant Bitcoin scam, many prominent figures of US such as Billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates were targeted by hackers on Twitter.
The official accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Kanye West had also requested for donations in the cryptocurrency.
Mr. Gates account had tweeted saying, “Everyone is asking me to give back, You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000.”
Other targets include of:
- the rapper Kanye West
- his wife, reality TV star Kim Kardashian
- former US President Obama
- former US Vice-President Joe Biden, who is the current Democratic presidential candidate
- media billionaire Mike Bloomberg
- the ride-sharing app Uber
- the iPhone-maker Apple
The Twitter accounts that were targeted all have millions of followers so in the short time, the link displayed in the tweets of targeted accounts received hundreds of contributions totalling more than $100,000, according to publicly available blockchain records.
The FBI’s San Francisco field office said on a statement that, “We advise the public not to fall victim to this scam by sending cryptocurrency or money in relation to this incident.”
Twitter said that it was a “co-ordinated” attack, that was for their employees with “with access to internal systems and tools”.
“We know they (the hackers) used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf,” the company said in a series of tweets.
The tweetes from the company added that while the company’s investigation was ongoing, “significant steps” were taken to limit access to such internal systems and tools.
The CEO of twitter Jack Dorsey tweeted, “Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.”
