An Internet scammer in a couple of hours "earned" $ 32,000 on Twitter using the nickname of Elon Musk
A fraudster portraying Space X founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk tricked Twitter users by stealing cryptocurrency in the response section of Donald Trump's tweets.
The verified account went online Wednesday under the display name "Elon Musk" and commenting on Trump's tweets that discussed the presidential election.
The fraudulent tweet says the election is almost won, and to celebrate the event, Elon Musk is giving away gifts to its followers.
To make everything look legal, links to YouTube videos on SpaceX's account have been added to Elon Musk's account.
Upon further investigation, it was determined that the verified account previously belonged to Emma Isaacs, who is the CEO of BusinessChicks, and her image is still displayed as a banner on the fraudulent account.
As the investigators note, this scam using the nickname "Elon Musk" is far from the first.
Notably, in order to combat this recurring scam, Twitter promised in 2018 that it would automatically block any account that changed its display name to "Elon Musk." That obviously didn't happen on Wednesday.
A similar but more devastating hack occurred on Twitter accounts in June, targeting high-profile users including Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos and of course Elon Musk.
The hackers claimed to have paid one or more Twitter employees to access internal systems that allowed them to hijack accounts and post tweets asking them to send them bitcoins.
About 300 people were tweeted, sending hackers $ 1,118,000 before Twitter deleted the tweets and blocked all verified accounts to prevent the hack from spreading further. In total, the attack lasted four hours.
In the following days, the name and face of the hacker became known, and he and three others were arrested.
The mastermind was 17-year-old Graham Ivan Clark, who lived in Florida and is currently charged with 30 felonies for hacking into these accounts, sending messages on their behalf, and luring additional victims to send him bitcoin donations, according to authorities. .