“The ruse included bogus tweets from former President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg and a number of tech billionaires including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Celebrities Kanye West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, were also hacked. The fake tweets offered to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address.”
What happened, or so Twitter now thinks, is that some of its employees were hacked, and their permissions were used to gain access to the accounts of influential people. That takes a real criminal mastermind like the ones in the comic books. But unlike comic book masterminds, these guys didn’t seem to know how to monetize their iniquity. The couldn’t really have expected many people to fall for the obviously phony “send me a thousand and I’ll send you two” scam, so it’s not clear what the point was meant to be.
I’m not convinced that this half-hearted crypto-currency scam, which apparently netted only $117,000, was the real endgame. Maybe they didn’t intend to “score” this time. I guess it could be a gambit by the intruders to test their methods, or perhaps to demonstrate their power, like when the Joker takes over all of the Gotham City TV stations just to prove he can do it. Or they may have posted the bitcoin scam as a red herring to cover up their data mining in Twitter’s servers. Time will tell. But it seems at this moment like they wasted access to vast power.
“POTUS” ? Is that a cult deity of some sort? Or just the clown who has screwed up the Virus thing so badly that we can’t go to places where they did things properly, on account of us having a “shithole country” health situation? Which your clown doesn’t seem to think is his responsibility.
You want some flakeyness, go look in a mirror. Screw you and the ape you worship.
Think I’m pissed off now? I’m going to be really pissed off on the 28th which won’t be the day I fly to Amsterdam, thanks to your hero.
I’ve seen a suggestion floated that someone wanted access to one or more of these accounts’ DMs or possibly some other account info, but couldn’t find a way to do so without being observed, so they staged the whole bitcoin scam to cover their tracks.
I find this only slightly plausible, since eventually Twitter will notice where they were rummaging around and what they downloaded, but it’s not totally silly.
I think the idea that bitcoin believers tend to skew towards the gullible is the most likely answer. The scammers have been running this hoax for months, by signing up for accounts with names similar to famous people like “Barock Obama” or “Elan Misk”. This is just a further iteration with real accounts.
Possibly the reason they haven’t tried to impersonate Trump is that no one would believe he would give anything away!
POTUS lives in snowflakes heads 24/7. Keep in mind this story had nothing to do with Trump, but why miss an opportunity to attack him?
You would like to think that, but his sleezy, repetitive, tired lounge act is beyond old and pointless and nearly at an end. In a little over 3 months he’s done, and so are you pathetic worthless people who will have to find something better to do than living your life around trying to troll people.
Maybe if you and the rest of the cult would have got off your ass and gotten an education these past four years, you would have had something to focus on instead you lard asses sitting in front of the idiot box watching Fox News all day. Three month, time to pay the piper.
“If I only had a brain.” Hey Brobonk, they’re playing your song.
Turns out that it was Twitter’s internal systems that were hacked, leading to the high jacked accounts.
Heckuva job, Jacko!
In that case, it’s surprising that they didn’t go for Trump. Perhaps his account has additional security features that are accessible to fewer people.
My guess is that the hackers figured no one would believe that Trump would really use his own money to make matching gifts to charity. People would have known right away that something was fake.
Good thing the cryptocurrency community isn’t full of gullible people desperate to make easy money fast!