Kanye West, Elon Musk and more hacked as part of huge Twitter cryptocurrency scam

Barack Obama, Apple, Joe Biden and more also fell victim to the hacking yesterday (July 15)

A host of celebrities and huge businesses have had their Twitter accounts hacked as part of what appears to be a massive cryptocurrency scam.

Yesterday (July 15), the likes of Kanye West, Elon Musk, former President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, as well as official accounts for Apple, Amazon and Uber were all targeted.

The tweets in question saw the celebrities and businesses tweeting an old-fashioned scam, getting fans to donate to a Bitcoin account, and saying they’ll double whatever is paid into the account.

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Though many of the tweets were deleted just minutes after being posted, and Twitter said it was “aware of a security incident” and “taking steps to fix it,” The Verge, reports that over $100,000 was sent to the hacker’s Bitcoin account in the time the tweets were up.

Bitcoin
Credit: Twitter.

Bitcoin
Credit: Twitter.

Bitcoin
Credit: Twitter.

Twitter’s official support account then revealed some of the details behind the scam, writing: “We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.

“We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf. We’re looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed and will share more here as we have it.”

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They went on to say that they “have locked accounts that were compromised and will restore access to the original account owner only when we are certain we can do so securely,” before adding: “Internally, we’ve taken significant steps to limit access to internal systems and tools while our investigation is ongoing. More updates to come as our investigation continues.”

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