Hackers announce distribution of cryptocurrency on behalf of the largest bitcoin owner

Cryptocurrency hackers have hacked into the Twitter account of the Nigerian Business Day news outlet and published an announcement of a digital asset giveaway on behalf of the largest bitcoin owner, MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor.

According to the tweets of the compromised Nigerian Business Day account, which has about 89,000 followers, MicroStrategy’s management allegedly announced the distribution of 5,000 BTC and 50,000 ETH. Users who wanted to receive the cryptocurrency had to send from 0.1 to 20 BTC or from 0.5 to 200 ETH to the specified donation address. The attackers promised that each investor would receive twice as much money as they sent.

To encourage more users, the fraudsters published information about the giveaway under the posts of Elon Musk and Changpeng Zhao, which are read by hundreds of thousands of people every day. Fortunately, most users did not believe in the fraudulent scheme, so the attackers managed to get only 0.06 ETH ($ 104).

The Nigerian Business Day situation once again proves the lack of mechanisms on Twitter that would identify bots and scammers, protecting real users. As a reminder, Elon Musk has repeatedly drawn the attention of Twitter’s management to the large number of fake accounts on the platform, but instead of addressing this issue, Twitter representatives planned to launch new functionality that would make life easier for hackers.

Besides Tesla’s CEO, Twitter users, the CEO of Binance-u-tvitteri/" data-wpel-link="internal">Binance, and a representative of Dogecoin cryptocurrency also drew attention to the problem of a large number of fake accounts. And yesterday, Cointelegraph identified 6 Twitter accounts with the well-known blue profile verification checkmark impersonating Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.