A group of scammers recently took over more than 8 accounts. The accounts belong to the founder of Pudgy Penguins, the CTO of OpenAI, the crypto hater Peter Schiff, and other prominent crypto figures.
Over the past few weeks we have seen 8+ account takeovers connected to the same group of scammers as evident by how their addresses are linked on-chain.
I hope @TwitterSafety investigates each attack closely as they have resulted in almost seven figures stolen. @miramurati… pic.twitter.com/ypnqyb5oNy
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) June 8, 2023
Scammers Took Nearly $1 Million
In the past few weeks, a group of scammers have taken over more than eight Twitter accounts. The victims are well-known people in the crypto space. Now, their accounts are used to promote phishing scams. According to ZachXBT, a blockchain sleuth, so far they have stolen nearly $1 million worth of crypto.
In a Twitter thread on June 9, ZachXBT claimed to have discovered a number of wallets that are “linked on chain” to phishing schemes that recently hacked accounts were promoting.
Moreover, ZachXBT said, “While the majority of these attacks were the result of a SIM Swap it seems other accounts were potentially stolen with a [Twitter admin] panel.”
The accounts belong to people like Cole Villemain, the founder of Pudgy Penguins; Steve Aoki, a DJ and NFT collector; and Pete Rizzo, the editor of Bitcoin Magazine.
Peter Schiff, who is a gold proponent and hates cryptocurrencies very much, had his account hacked. They used his account to share a questionable link about tokenized gold in Decentralized Finance.
“I hope Twitter Safety investigates each attack closely as they have resulted in almost seven figures stolen,” said Zach XBT.
In addition, it said, “When the scammer gains control of a Twitter account, phishing scams are tweeted out almost immediately. Slow response times from Twitter Support have resulted in some of these tweets staying up for many hours and even days.”
The blockchain sleuth advised people that they should use a security key instead of two-factor authentication via SMS.
Specifically, ZachXBT points out that OpenAI’s CTO, Mira Murati, had her account hacked. On June 2, people in the cryptocurrency community warned her about sharing a phishing link for a fake airdrop of an ERC-20 token called OPENAI on her account.
This post was on Twitter for about an hour. During that time, it was viewed 79,600 times and retweeted 83 times. In particular, the scammers limited who could reply to the tweet so that people wouldn’t post warnings on it.
Late in May, Arthur Madrid, co-founder and CEO of metaverse platform The Sandbox, also had his Twitter account hacked in the same way. Following the same style, the hackers promoted a fake SAND airdrop. However, it is not clear if this hack is part of the group that ZachXBT has identified.
