Twitter cryptocurrency scams: A hundred Elon Musks — and now Target

[harlan4096]

“We are celebrating and giving away N bitcoins to our fans! Just transfer 0.01 BTC to the wallet below and we’ll return 0.1 BTC!” That’s what an average cryptocurrency scam looks like.

Of course, once you’ve transferred your cryptocurrency to the specified wallet, no one is going to pay you back. Those who posted the tweets were just scammers looking for easy money (and it’s rather hard to catch them; bitcoin provides some degree of anonymity). Who is going to fall for that? Actually, a lot of people — if the scam is presented to them by someone they trust.

A short history of Twitter cryptocurrency scams

Cryptocurrency scams first came to light when scammers pretending to be Elon Musk, CEO of Space X and Tesla, claimed to be giving away Ethereum for whatever reason, be it the launch of the new Space X rocket or the production of yet another Tesla car.

Elon Musk uses Twitter quite a lot for PR and communication, and he has more than 20 million followers. The scammers created accounts that borrowed his avatar and his name, as well as similar Twitter handles (say @elonmask instead of @elonmusk). Then, using these accounts, they replied to his original posts, promoting fake giveaways so that they looked like they came from Musk himself — unless, of course, you were paying close attention.

Full reading: https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/twitter-c...ams/24560/