Bitcoin Twitter Scam: How and What happened? Everything in Detail read here

“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”, said Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, late at night on 15 July 2020 in reference to the bitcoin twitter scam that happened on 15 July 2020 and shook the entire world. 

The highlights of the incident says that a total of 130 high-profile, verified twitter accounts were affected out of which 45 accounts were used to tweet scam messages. Among the affected accounts were former US President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and celebrities like Kanye West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West. The accounts that were hacked has at least a million followers each.

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This incident has raised questions upon Twitter’s internal security systems. It is believed that the hackers took advantage of social engineering to get access to Twitter’s internal tools.

How and what exactly happened?

On Wednesday, 15 July, a group of unknown people hacked several high-profiled twitter accounts and started tweeting same messages saying that any Bitcoin payments that are sent to the address mentioned in the tweet, would be doubled by them. The hackers used verified profiles of renowned personalities such as former US President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and celebrities like Kanye West and Kim Kardashian West.

The scam evidently intended to promote Bitcoin and steal money. Soon after the incident, Twitter locked many verified accounts of high-profiled people in order to prevent further scamming. Twitter believes that it was a coordinated act which targeted twitter employees to get access to the administrative tools.

After this incident lot of people are confused as to what is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency also known as a virtual or digital currency which is not the currency of any particular country and cannot be printed. It is said that Bitcoin has made transactions quite easy but the person who invented it has not been tracked yet. Bitcoin is mainly used in trading and investments.