Published 19:16 IST, July 16th 2020
Floyd Mayweather's Twitter a/c hacked in bitcoin scam along with Barack Obama, Bill Gates
American professional boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. was amongst the many prominent celebrities who saw their Twitter accounts hacked in a major bitcoin scam.
- SportFit
- 3 min read
American professional boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr was amongst the many prominent celebrities that fell prey to a Twitter hack on Thursday. The Twitter bitcoin scam saw the accounts of prominent celebrities like Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Kim Kardashian, and various others hacked to promote a cryptocurrency scam. The Twitter bitcoin scam saw over 300 transactions take place, after the hacker or the group of hackers responsible first gained access to Twitter's company network.
Twitter hack: Floyd Mayweather Twitter hacked in major scam along with Barack Obama and Bill Gates
On Thursday, Floyd Mayweather Twitter account was hacked into in a major Twitter bitcoin scam that rocked the cryptocurrency world. A number of verified Twitter accounts belonging to major figures in politics, entertainment, tech and business were hacked into with each account varying versions of the same message, asking followers to donate money in cryptocurrency with the promise of being paid back double the amount. Floyd Mayweather, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, Mike Bloomberg, and Democratic nominee for President, Joe Biden all fell prey to the Twitter hack and all their tweets included a working Bitcoin address to send the money to. Here's the message that was posted on Floyd Mayweather's account:
(Picture Courtesy: Floyd Mayweather Twitter)
Floyd Mayweather Twitter hacked: Social Media platform responds to Twitter hack
The micro-blogging website responded to the Twitter hack and addressed the situation by restricting the ability to tweet or reset the password for some users in order to stop the Twitter hack from affecting more users. The restrictions were later removed when Twitter announced that it had detected a coordinated social engineering attack by hackers who initially targetted employees of the micro-blogging company who had access to sensitive data like internal systems and tools. Reports claim that information related to the Twitter admin tool comes from people having direct knowledge of the framework, possibly, an employee of Twitter itself.
On Blockchain.com, the account has received a total of "12.86" BTC, which in US currency is approximately a whopping $118,482.65. It is expected that Twitter's support group will provide detailed information about the Bitcoin scam hack soon. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey later said that it was a tough day for everyone at the company and said that the micro-blogging site will diagnosing and will share everything they can on the Twitter hack when they have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.
(Image Courtesy: Floyd Mayweather Jr Instagram)
Updated 19:16 IST, July 16th 2020