In a recent spate of attacks, fraudsters have taken over at least eight Twitter accounts of crypto influencers, promoting phishing scams and swindling nearly $1 million in digital assets, reports blockchain investigator ZachXBT. He identified several wallets connected to these scams through on-chain links associated with the hijacked accounts.
Among the victims are high-profile individuals like Pudgy Penguins’ Cole Villemain, DJ and NFT collector Steve Aoki, and Bitcoin Magazine’s Pete Rizzo. Even staunch crypto critic Peter Schiff’s account was exploited to push a suspicious link related to tokenized gold in DeFi.
ZachXBT suggests some of these breaches might have occurred through a Twitter admin panel, in addition to SIM swapping. Once the scammers gained control, they instantly began posting phishing scams. Lackluster response times from Twitter allowed some fraudulent tweets to remain active for several hours, sometimes even days.
OpenAI’s CTO Mira Murati and The Sandbox co-founder Arthur Madrid were also among those targeted. The scams often involved promoting fake airdrops of ERC-20 tokens, with Murati’s account used to promote a counterfeit OPENAI token airdrop.
The investigator urged users to adopt security keys for two-factor authentication rather than SMS-based options. He called on Twitter to thoroughly investigate these incidents, given the substantial amount stolen.
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