Apple, Biden, Bill Gates, Obama and other high-profile Twitter accounts hacked in crypto scam

A number of high-profile Twitter accounts were simultaneously hacked on Wednesday by attackers who used the accounts — some with millions of followers — to spread a cryptocurrency scam.


Apple, Elon Musk, Joe Biden and Bill Gates were among the accounts compromised in a broadly targeted hack that remained mysterious hours after taking place. Those accounts and many others posted a message promoting the address of a bitcoin wallet with the claim that the amount of any payments made to the address would be doubled and sent back — a known cryptocurrency scam technique.


In the hours following the initial scam posts, Kim Kardashian West, Jeff Bezos, Barack Obama, Wiz Khalifa, Warren Buffett, YouTuber MrBeast, Wendy’s, Uber, CashApp and Mike Bloomberg also posted the cryptocurrency scam.










Before the scope of the incident became clear, the hack initially appeared to target cryptocurrency-focused accounts. In an initial wave of scam posts, @bitcoin, @ripple, @coindesk, @coinbase and @binance were hacked with the same message: “We have partnered with CryptoForHealth and are giving back 5000 BTC to the community,” followed by a link to a website, which we are not linking to.










The linked website was quickly pulled offline. Kristaps Ronka, chief executive of Namesilo, the domain registrar used by the scammers, told TechCrunch that the company suspended the domain “on the first report” it received.


Hacked accounts shifted to sharing multiple bitcoin wallet addresses as the incident went on, making things more difficult to track. Twitter acknowledged the situation at 2:45 p.m. PT Wednesday afternoon, referring to it as a “security incident.”