Cryptocurrency This Week: Twitter Bitcoin Scam Explained & More

High-profile Twitter account holders, including former US president Barack Obama along with Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, presumptive Democratic candidate for president Joe Biden among others, on Wednesday (July 15), were the target of a Bitcoin-related scam. The well-orchestrated hack posted similar tweets, all instructing people to send Bitcoins to an unknown cryptocurrency wallet.

More than 373 users fell for the scam, losing a total of INR 89 Lakh before the Tweets were removed by the Twitter authority. “The attacker had complete access to Twitter — they could have posted anything from any of the official accounts, but they chose to seek Bitcoins through false promises,” shared Arjun Vijay, cofounder and COO of Giottus Cryptocurrency.

Further, he said people should be more careful, and there is no easy money, and most crypto giveaways that ask for contributions are scams. “We hope this brings awareness, and Twitter users do not fall for these kinds of scams again,” Vijay added.

In the Bitcoin-scam aftermath, Twitter had temporarily blocked all high-profile verified accounts from posting or even changing their passwords while it investigated and sought to resolve the issue. Twitter said that it will provide more details on the issue in the future as and when the investigation unfolds.

Based on what we know right now, we believe approximately 130 accounts were targeted by the attackers in some way as part of the incident. For a small subset of these accounts, the attackers were able to gain control of the accounts and then send Tweets from those accounts.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 17, 2020

According to the New York Times report, four young hackers were involved in the well-organised Twitter scam. The report stated that the Bitcoin scam was traced back to a group of hackers who met at OGusers.com, a username-swapping community where people buy and sell online handles. The Times noted that the Twitter hack is not from Russian or other sophisticated hacker groups but was done by a group of young people, ‘one of whom says he lives at home with his mother.’

Accordingly, two users, ‘lol’ and ‘ever so anxious’ came into contact with ‘Kirk,’ who had access to most sensitive tools, which allowed him to take control of almost any Twitter account, including the 130 high-profile accounts that were being hacked, the report added.

According to Twitter’s blog, the hackers targeted Twitter employees through a social engineering scheme. In other words, social engineering schemes are the intentional manipulation of people into performing certain actions and revealing confidential information. Further, it stated that the attackers successfully manipulated a small number of employees and used their credentials to access Twitter’s internal systems.

“As of now, we know that they accessed tools only available to our internal support teams to target 130 Twitter accounts,” Twitter added.

The price of Bitcoin (BTC) at the time of writing was $9,172.20 with a market cap of $169.11 Bn, compared to last week (July 14, 2020) which stood at $9,186.59, with a market cap of $169.32 Bn.

Ethereum (ETH), on the other hand, was priced at $237.35, with a market cap of $26.54 Bn at the time of writing, compared to last week (July 14, 2020), where the price of the cryptocurrency was $227.24, with a market cap of $25.35 Bn.

Cryptocurrency News Of The Week: 

Former Finance Secretary Of India Not Okay With Cryptocurrency 

The former finance secretary of India, Subhash Chandra Garg, the man behind the bill that proposed a blanket ban on cryptocurrencies, ten-year jail terms and an INR 25 Cr hefty fine, on Friday (July 17), discussed cryptocurrencies fate with the Indian industry leaders and experts, which included Nischal Shetty, the CEO of WazirX, and Siddharth Sogani, the founder of blockchain research company Crebaco.

At a recent webinar organised by CREBACO Global, he said that he approves of the use of crypto assets as regulated commodities, but said that it must not be allowed to function as currencies in India. Sharing his opinion, Garg said that the way cryptocurrency works is on the distributed ledger technology (DLT). “It’s a high investment technology. It can never be a common man’s currency,” he added.

COTI Lists On Binance-Owned WazirX 

COTI, an acronym for ‘currency of the internet,’ recently announced its listing on the Indian crypto exchange platform WazirX. With this, COTI will be integrated with a Tether (USDT) cryptocurrency pair COTI/USDT on WazirX. COTI is the world’s first directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based blockchain protocol optimised for seamless and scalable payments and low transaction costs. It is one of the most secure and fast which can facilitate thousands of transactions per second.

CoolBitX Partners With Elliptic To Fast Track FATF Travel Rule

Taipei-based blockchain security company CoolBitX recently announced its partnership with Elliptic, a crypto asset risk management platform to launch one the first operational Travel Rule solutions for crypto called Sygna Bridge. This combined tool is said to offer customers a complete solution to fulfil anti-money laundering and compliance obligations, including the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) Travel Rule.

Michael Ou, CEO of CoolBitX, in a press statement, said that the solution will provide customers with the ability to protect themselves from violating any Anti-Money Laundering/Combating the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) laws and regulations, allow them to assist regulators to combat illicit money laundering activities, and stay compliant with changing norms.