Scammers have used more than eight Twitter identities belonging to well-known personalities in the cryptocurrency industry over the past several weeks to spread phishing scams.According to blockchain investigator ZachXBT, the organization has so far stolen cryptocurrency valued at close to $1 million.ZachXBT detailed his discovery of multiple “linked on chain” wallets tied to phishing schemes advocated by the recently compromised accounts in a thread on Twitter on June 9. While a SIM Swap caused the majority of these attacks, ZachXBT noticed that more accounts may have been potentially taken through a panel.
The accounts belong to individuals including DJ and NFT collector Steve Aoki, founder of Pudgy Penguins Cole Villemain, and editor of Bitcoin Magazine Pete Rizzo.It’s very ironic that Peter Schiff, a staunch supporter of gold and a fierce opponent of cryptocurrencies, too had his account compromised in order to promote a bogus link regarding tokenized gold in decentralized finance.ZachXBT stated, “I hope Twitter Safety investigates each attack closely as they have resulted in almost seven figures being stolen,” and added:“Phishing scams are tweeted out practically instantly once the fraudster takes over a Twitter account.Some of these tweets have been available for many hours or even days as a result of Twitter Support’s slow response times.
Instead of using two-factor authentication that relies solely on SMS, the blockchain detective advised users to employ security keys.Mira Murati, the chief technology officer of OpenAI, was the target of yet another account hack, as revealed by ZachXBT.Her account shared a phishing link on June 2 that advertised a phony airdrop for the ERC-20 token OPENAI, prompting complaints from the crypto community.Before it was removed, this post had been up for almost an hour and had received 79,600 views and 83 retweets.Notably, in order to prevent others from tweeting warnings, the scammers limited who could react to the tweet.The same kind of Twitter account attack that resulted in Arthur Madrid, co-founder and CEO of metaverse platform The Sandbox, being targeted also happened to him in late May.