Crypto World Figure's Fraudster Group Breaks Into Twitter Accounts, Garong Nearly One Million Dollars

Illustration of crypto hackers who broke the account of a famous figure. (photo: Doc. pexels)

A group of fraudsters has managed to hack more than eight Twitter accounts belonging to well-known figures in the crypto world in recent weeks to promote phishing scams. According to blockchain researcher ZachXBT, the group has stolen nearly a million dollars worth of crypto (IDR 14.8 billion).

In a tweet series on Twitter on June 9, ZachXBT revealed that he had discovered several "on-chain" wallets related to phishing scams promoted through newly hacked accounts.

"Although most of these attacks were the result of SIM Swap, it appears that there are other accounts that may have been stolen via Twitter's [admin] panel," wrote ZachXBT.

The accounts belonged to figures such as the founders of Pudgydiades, Cole Villemain, NFT DJ and collector Steve Aoki, as well as Bitcoin Magazine editor Pete total.

Surprisingly, vocal gold supporter and crypto opponents Peter Schiff also experienced account hacking to promote a doubty link related to tokenized gold in DeFi (Decentralized Finance).

"I hope Twitter Safety investigates every in-depth attack as it has caused a loss of nearly seven digits," said ZachXBT, adding:

"When the fraudster took over the Twitter account, the phishing scam was quickly tweeted. The slow response time from Twitter Support resulted in some of these tweets remaining for hours and even days," Schiff said, quoted by Cointelegraph.

This blockchain researcher encourages people to use security keys instead of authentication of two SMS-based factors.

One of the attacks on accounts revealed by ZachXBT including OpenAI CTO, Mira Murati.

On June 2, members of the crypto community issued a warning regarding their account sharing phishing links promoting fake airdrops for an ERC-20 token called OPENAI.

The post remained active for about an hour and was viewed by 79,600 people and retweeted 83 times before it was removed. Fraudsters also limit who can reply to the tweet to stop people warning.

In late May, Arthur Madrid, co-founder and CEO of metaverse platform The Sandbox was also a victim of a similar attack on a Twitter account promoting fake airdrops for SAND.

It is not clear whether this hack is linked to the hacker group identified by ZachXBT.