If the technology these days have reached new heights, so has the ways of committing new crimes and deceiving people. Twitter has reported to have had scammers that earned around $145 recently by scamming people and tricking them into fake giveaways by hacking into high end company accounts and making it seem like they hosted them. This news first came out in the open through a site called Bleeping Computers that provides free computer help through its platform and covers such news that is related to technology.
The hackers attacked those accounts that had followers of at least thousand if not million and all of them were verified accounts to make the giveaways look more authentic. The accounts that got hacked were of the companies like Tesla, Gemini Exchange, Elon Musk, Social Capital and Palihapitiya. The hackers had attached some links to different sites with their tweets, when clicking onto those links; the user was redirected to a site that was pretending to be the site for that acted giveaway, which included more links attached with it.
Upon visiting those sites, the person is told to send their crypto currency to the address that the hackers listed below, the user is also told that they will get the amount back that too doubled from the address they send that money too. Through this the scammers made around $145 in just a week and even though so much technology has developed to put these corrupt people in jail, no one yet has been able to find these hackers and put them where they belong, but no matter how much we blame the hackers for committing such crime, the people falling into this prey are equally at fault and get to be blamed too.
In our investigation we found that these bad actors are also leveraging the power of social media and search engine advertising, in a case we found these scammy ads being hosted on different websites and platforms through Google Ads.
Different InfoSec publishers including Bleeping Computer and others try with their full force to cover these scams but people still continue to fall for them. These hackers though have no plan onto stopping, Malware Hunting Team that has been looking over these scammers reported that these hackers are still continuing to earn this way and the people are still falling into their prey.
As much as we wish that these hackers stop with their tactics or a technology gets developed that can catch these scammers in between their acts, people on the internet too need to understand that such giveaways are made by scammers and the whole scheme of these sites look nothing but like fraud and anything that the people invest will not get any result in return. Most crypto currency giveaways have never had any authenticity to them and they never will in the future as well.
Read next: The Hidden Black Market of Social Media Accounts
The hackers attacked those accounts that had followers of at least thousand if not million and all of them were verified accounts to make the giveaways look more authentic. The accounts that got hacked were of the companies like Tesla, Gemini Exchange, Elon Musk, Social Capital and Palihapitiya. The hackers had attached some links to different sites with their tweets, when clicking onto those links; the user was redirected to a site that was pretending to be the site for that acted giveaway, which included more links attached with it.
Upon visiting those sites, the person is told to send their crypto currency to the address that the hackers listed below, the user is also told that they will get the amount back that too doubled from the address they send that money too. Through this the scammers made around $145 in just a week and even though so much technology has developed to put these corrupt people in jail, no one yet has been able to find these hackers and put them where they belong, but no matter how much we blame the hackers for committing such crime, the people falling into this prey are equally at fault and get to be blamed too.
In our investigation we found that these bad actors are also leveraging the power of social media and search engine advertising, in a case we found these scammy ads being hosted on different websites and platforms through Google Ads.
Different InfoSec publishers including Bleeping Computer and others try with their full force to cover these scams but people still continue to fall for them. These hackers though have no plan onto stopping, Malware Hunting Team that has been looking over these scammers reported that these hackers are still continuing to earn this way and the people are still falling into their prey.
And it's still being used... pic.twitter.com/61QtOCWLIg
— MalwareHunterTeam (@malwrhunterteam) February 16, 2021
Another verified account is being used to spread scam: https://t.co/pYtIuroCvn
— MalwareHunterTeam (@malwrhunterteam) February 26, 2021
Another one using vaccine and Syria as keywords...
Also it currently faking as Musk, but not even 20 minutes ago there was tweet in Chamath's name. Skids...
😂@Spam404 pic.twitter.com/hTuUmnLukm
As much as we wish that these hackers stop with their tactics or a technology gets developed that can catch these scammers in between their acts, people on the internet too need to understand that such giveaways are made by scammers and the whole scheme of these sites look nothing but like fraud and anything that the people invest will not get any result in return. Most crypto currency giveaways have never had any authenticity to them and they never will in the future as well.
Read next: The Hidden Black Market of Social Media Accounts
