WASHINGTON – Twitter pages of several prominent personalities were hacked apparently to advertise a Bitcoin-based Ponzi scheme.
The famous people targeted by the hackers included US presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Late on Wednesday, the post on Biden’s Twitter page read, “I am giving back to the community. All Bitcoin sent to the address below will be sent back doubled! If you send $1,000, I will send back $2,000. Only doing this for 30 minutes”.
The same posts were emerged on Twitter accounts of Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, microsoft founder Bill Gates, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and rapper Kanye West.
While taking action on the scam, Twitter stopped many verified accounts to counter the activity. “Most accounts should be able to Tweet again. As we continue working on a fix, this functionality may come and go.
We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible,” Twitter said on late Wednesday.
Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.
We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.
💙 to our teammates working hard to make this right.
— jack (@jack) July 16, 2020