Crypto hackers attack Elon Musk’s Twitter account again

NEW DELHI: Despite Twitter attempting to ban scammers and impersonators on its platform, one impersonator broke into Tesla Chairman and CEO Elon Musk’s official account on Thursday with a fake lookalike verified account, promising his 22.5 million followers free Bitcoin and ethereum cryptocurrencies.

As the real Musk was busy penning down some poetic words for his followers in the wee hours of Thursday, the impersonator appeared in his thread line with a fake Twitter verified account, asking his users to trade and gain in cryptocurrencies. “As many of you know by now, we will soon be making Tesla a private company. It is an important step towards stability and it would be impossible to move forward in a desirable pace without making such decisions,” the impersonator wrote in a fake statement in the name of Musk on Medium.

“As a part of reorganization we will be introducing Bitcoin and Ethereum as official payment methods,” he said, adding that “it is one of the steps in moving forward as a company”.

Musk, who was awake just before the impersonator joined his thread line to fool his followers, was yet to reply to this. Some of his users, however, who fell for the fake account, took to his thread line: “Report this account, already stealing from people bitcoins,” wrote one user.

Twitter, in a statement, reacted by saying it was working on ways of bringing the issue under control. “We’re aware of this form of manipulation and are proactively implementing a number of signals to prevent these types of accounts from engaging with others in a deceptive manner.” (IANS)