Hacked Elon Musk tweets Bitcoin scam to 37 million followers

Elon Musk's official Twitter account just tweeted a Bitcoin scam to his followers. But he's not the only one.

2 min read

Jul 15, 2020

Elon Musk is the latest victim of the cryptocurrency scam attack currently taking over Crypto Twitter. His official account just tweeted a Bitcoin giveaway to his 36.9 million followers, that is, of course, fake.

So far, 4.2 Bitcoin ($39,000) has been sent to the address, either by the perpetrators, or by its victims.

Elon Musk's latest tweet. This is a scam and not a giveaway. Image: Twitter.

Elon Musk has long been the target of many crypto scams and giveaways on Twitter. For years, fake accounts have been set up replying to his tweets with accounts that look similar to his official account and pretending to give away Bitcoin. The scam is pretty simple, the perpetrators simply receive the Bitcoin and never send any back.

A new scam recently started using vanity Bitcoin addresses, containing the words "Elon Musk" within the Bitcoin addresses themselves. This scam brought in $2 million in two months.

His tweet comes just moments after many popular crypto accounts were similarly compromised. The accounts of major crypto exchanges Binance, Coinbase, Gemini, KuCoin and Bitfinex posted tweets advertising a fake company called CryptoForHealth. The same scam was tweeted by Litecoin founder Charlie Lee and Tron CEO Justin Sun.

“We have partnered with CryptoForHealth and are giving back 5000 BTC,” the tweets read, with a link to a scam website. The Bitcoin blockchain address associated with the CryptoForHealth scam is the same one that Musk advertised in his tweet.

It is unclear how so many Twitter accounts have been compromised. Andreas Antonopoulos tweeted, "It seems like some Twitter API posting service has been compromised and being used to send out fake "giveaway" tweets from popular crypto/blockchain accounts. "CryptoForHealth" is a scam."

A Binance spokesperson told Decrypt, “The security team is actively investigating the situation of this coordinated attack on crypto Twitter.”

Perhaps Twitter needs to start investigating.

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