Celebrity Twitter Accounts Hacked for Bitcoin Scam

No blue checkmark is safe.

On Wednesday, July 15th, 2020, twitter accounts owned by celebrities, politicians, and leaders in tech were hacked as part of a bitcoin scam. The accounts that were compromised included Bill Gates, Kanye West, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and presidential hopeful Joe Biden.

In response, Twitter blocked access for all verified accounts for a brief time.

Back in May, the amount of bitcoin available to mine was halved, which some investors believe will increase the price of the digital currency. The halving along with the general anonymity bitcoin provides makes it all the more incentivizing for scammers to buy in.

Perhaps equally as shocking as the wave of hacks is how many people actually sent bitcoin to the scammer’s wallet address. As many as 400 payments totaling $121,000 were sent to the address. I’ll go out on a limb and say that Kanye is trying to fund his presidential campaign while having an alibi, or a shocking amount of people have never seen an online scam before.

If you haven’t already, you can further protect your tweets by enabling two-factor authentication and by altering your account’s discoverability settings.