Since 2018, scammers began to impersonate noted cryptocurrency enthusiast Elon Musk. They would use his profile photo, select a user name similar to his, and tweet out a double return offer on cryptocurrency. These smaller scamming sessions were carried out for a long run until this year when they were able to compromise the most influencing twitter users.
On July 15, Twitter accounts belonging to Elon Musk, Apple, Bill Gates, Barak Obama, Uber, Bitcoin, Coinbase, Gemini, Binance, Kraken, and many more verified users were compromised. This was noticed in the mass when all these accounts tweeted links to a site (cryptoforhealth.com), which is a scam, claiming to be giving away double the bitcoin you send to the given bitcoin address.
Unfortunately, many people have already fallen for the scam sending more than 13 BTC ($118,000) within the first day of the tweets. Meanwhile, the tweets were online for only a few hours or less.
Twitter had immediately started investigating and taking steps to fix it. For now, Twitter has limited functionality(disabled tweets) for a much larger group of accounts, like all verified accounts except Twitter Support and other official accounts of the Twitter company through which they are sending out updates on the support and steps from the company.
A Twitter user associated with the account @example_dev has registered a domain bc1qxy2kgdygjrsqtzq2n0yrf2493p83kkfjhx0wlh.com in order to alert people and ask them to not send any bitcoin to this address (bc1qxy2kgdygjrsqtzq2n0yrf2493p83kkfjhx0wlh) which was related with the twitter scam. More than 3000 site visits were recorded to this domain within the first hour of the registration.
