Following the appearance of billionaire Elon Musk on the legendary American program Saturday Night Live (SNL), scammers took advantage of several verified Twitter accounts in which they promoted fake gifts, managing to steal USD 100,000 in cryptocurrencies.

Among the crypto assets that the hackers obtained with the scam are bitcoin (BTC), ether, Ethereum’s native cryptocurrency and, Musk’s favorite, dogecoin .

It can be verified in the different addresses provided, that the scammers got at least USD 40,840 in BTC; USD 13,758 in ETH and USD 42,457 in DOGE.

The tactic used by cybercriminals on this occasion was to access Twitter accounts verified and changed the names of those accounts also to “SNL”, using the fact that Musk was going to participate in the program . However, they left the existing Twitter identifiers and biographies.

Then they proceeded to send messages asking their potential victims for small amounts of cryptocurrencies , in order to verify their addresses and, in turn, guaranteeing a profit 10 times higher than invested .

Among the accounts used by criminals was that of the Argentine senator, Jorge Taiana. Currently, the account is active but the publications of the giveaway were removed, as well as the profile image.

They also promoted a gift of 5,000 BTC in name from the CEO of Tesla in a fake post on Medium, a blog publishing service.

The account @malwrhunterteam, which is in charge of investigating fraud, He assured in a message that “this type of scam has been going on for a long time, people lost millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies and there are still no real signs of concern from Twitter.”

It is not the first time that criminals take advantage of the image of Elon Musk to scam through the microblogging social network. Last March, CritptoNoticias reviewed the case of a German who, believing in promises of supposed quick profits, lost 10 BTC.

Other personalities who have “offered” bitcoin

In 2020, the official Twitter accounts of the exchange house Cryptocurrencies Binance and its founder, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), were hacked, as well as that of the founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, that of the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, that of the former president of the United States, Barack Obama, to offer 5,000 BTC.

It is important to note that a tycoon like Elon Musk or Bill Gates will hardly give away bitcoin or money through social networks. So it is important to note that “gifts” are often a scam similar to phishing .

This is a technique that consists of impersonation identity of an authority, company or someone, in order to deceive the victim into revealing their confidential information.

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