Kanye West, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, others hacked in unprecedented Twitter attacks by cryptocurrency scammers

Hackers promoting cryptocurrency scams targeted Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Kanye West, among other high-profile Twitter users, by using their accounts to promise to “double” payments to a bitcoin account.

Scammers also were able to manipulate accounts belonging to Joe Biden, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and former New York City mayor and billionaire media figure Mike Bloomberg, among others.

“Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time,” said a message on the Microsoft founder’s Twitter page, linking to a bitcoin address and promising to “double” all payments “for the next 30 minutes.”

A similar message appeared on the Tesla CEO’s account:”I’m feeling generous because of Covid-19. I’ll double any BTC payment sent to my BTC address for the next hour. Good luck, and stay safe out there!”

The message was deleted and replaced with another similar message: “Feeling greatful [sic], doubling all payments to my BTC address!”

“You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000,” the message said.

Scammers targeted several other accounts, including Apple, Uber, Square’s Cash App and the Winklevoss’ Gemini.

The scam appears to have worked – unconfirmed transactions show that the scammers have netted several thousands of dollars.

It was not immediately clear how the scammers had access to the accounts and how many people were impacted.

Twitter did not immediately return a request for comment by The Independent