Over the previous few weeks, a gaggle of scammers has hijacked greater than eight Twitter accounts belonging to outstanding figures within the crypto house to advertise phishing scams. The group has stolen nearly $1 million price of crypto to this point, based on blockchain sleuth ZachXBT.
In a June 9 Twitter thread, ZachXBT outlined that he had uncovered a number of wallets “linked on chain” which are related to phishing scams promoted by the lately hacked accounts.
“Whereas nearly all of these assaults had been the results of a SIM Swap it appears different accounts had been probably stolen with a [Twitter admin] panel,” ZachXBT famous.
Over the previous few weeks we have now seen 8+ account takeovers related to the identical group of scammers as evident by how their addresses are linked on-chain.
I hope @TwitterSafety investigates every assault intently as they’ve resulted in nearly seven figures stolen. @miramurati… pic.twitter.com/ypnqyb5oNy
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) June 8, 2023
The accounts belong to figures reminiscent of Pudgy Penguins founder Cole Villemain, DJ and NFT collector Steve Aoki and Bitcoin Journal editor Pete Rizzo.
Oddly sufficient, gold proponent and fervent crypto hater Peter Schiff additionally noticed his account hacked to advertise a doubtful hyperlink referring to tokenized gold in Decentralized Finance.
“I hope Twitter Security investigates every assault intently as they’ve resulted in nearly seven figures stolen,” ZachXBT mentioned, including that:
“When the scammer good points management of a Twitter account, phishing scams are tweeted out nearly instantly. Gradual response occasions from Twitter Assist have resulted in a few of these tweets staying up for a lot of hours and even days.”
The blockchain sleuth urged individuals to make use of a safety key versus choosing SMS-based two-factor authentication.
One other one of many account hacks highlighted by ZachXBT contains OpenAI’s CTO Mira Murati.
Associated: Uniswap rip-off alert: Fraudsters impersonate executives and create pretend web site
On June 2, members of the crypto group fired off warnings about her account sharing a phishing hyperlink selling a pretend airdrop for an ERC-20 token named OPENAI.
This explicit submit was stay for roughly an hour and was seen 79,600 occasions and retweeted 83 occasions earlier than it was deleted. Notably, the scammers had restricted who might reply to the tweet in a bid to cease individuals inserting warnings on it.
In late Might, Arthur Madrid, the co-founder and CEO of metaverse platform The Sandbox was additionally topic to the identical model of Twitter account hack that noticed the promotion of a pretend SAND airdrop.
It’s unclear if this explicit hack is related to the group of hackers recognized by ZachXBT nonetheless.
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