Scammers Steal Nearly $1 Million After Hijacking Over 8 Top Crypto Twitter Accounts

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Over the past few weeks, a group of scammers has hijacked more than eight Twitter accounts belonging to prominent figures in the crypto space to promote phishing scams. The group has stolen nearly $1 million worth of crypto so far, according to blockchain sleuth ZachXBT.

In a June 9 Twitter thread, ZachXBT reported that he discovered several chain-linked wallets that are linked to phishing scams promoted by the recently hacked accounts.

While the majority of these attacks were the result of a SIM card swap, it appears that other accounts were potentially stolen with a [Twitter admin] panel, noted ZachXBT.

The accounts belong to the likes of Pudgy Penguins founder Cole Villemain, DJ and NFT collector Steve Aoki, and Bitcoin Magazine editor Pete Rizzo.

Curiously, gold supporter and staunch crypto hater Peter Schiff also had his account hacked to promote a dubious link relating to tokenized gold in decentralized finance.

I hope Twitter Safety will investigate each attack closely as they resulted in nearly seven digits being stolen, ZachXBT said, adding that:

When the scammer takes over a Twitter account, phishing scams are tweeted almost immediately. Slow response times from Twitter support caused some of these tweets to remain active for many hours or even days. Phishing scams on Twitter. Source: ZachXBT, Twitter

The blockchain sleuth urged people to use a security key instead of opting for SMS-based two-factor authentication.

Another of the account hacks highlighted by ZachXBT includes OpenAIs CTO Mira Murati.

Related: Uniswap Scam Alert: Fraudsters Impersonate Executives and Create Fake Website

On June 2, members of the crypto community issued warnings about his account sharing a phishing link promoting a fake airdrop for an ERC-20 token named OPENAI.

This particular post was live for about an hour and was viewed 79,600 times and retweeted 83 times before being deleted. Notably, the scammers had restricted who could reply to the tweet in an effort to prevent people from placing warnings on it.

At the end of May, Arthur Madrid, the co-founder and CEO of metaverse platform The Sandbox was also subjected to the same style of Twitter account hack that saw the promotion of a fake SAND airdrop.

However, it is unclear if this particular hack is related to the group of hackers identified by ZachXBT.

Magazine: $3.4 Billion Bitcoin in a Popcorn Box The Story of the Silk Road Hackers

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