Another day, another scam.
Just days after the Telegram Twitter hijack, Vertcoin’s official handle on Twitter was hacked and another free giveaway was announced. The tweet said that Vertcoin was pleased to announce a 10 BTC giveaway on sending 0.005 to a particular wallet.
Hey, everyone! Vertcoin and staff are pleased to announce that we’re doing a 10 BTC giveaway to our followers to celebrate Vertcoin’s success. Send 0.005 to 3HU5sj7kB6wT9zRwpbhCRrR28vKWjfkMKf enter! Winner will be announced 5/3/18 at 8pm EST.
— Vertcoin (@Vertcoin) May 1, 2018
However, before anybody could fall for the scam, the project lead James Lovejoy, called the tweet out for the fraud it was on the thread itself.
The @Vertcoin twitter account has been compromised. We have contacted @TwitterSupport. DO NOT accept any giveaways, they are all fake.
— James Lovejoy (@jamesl22) May 1, 2018
This is the second time that a verified Twitter account has been used to propagate a scam. A similar thing happened to Telegram only a couple of days ago, when Pavel Durov announced that they were having issues with the servers, a group of scamsters hacked a verified Swedish band’s account, cloned it to look legit and announced a give away of 1000 BTC and ETH for their customers support.
This was a successful scam, because it was live for almost thirty minutes before people realised it was a scam and by the time the scammers had already managed to make one full bitcoin.
Scams are everywhere and they happen all the time. The cause to be worried here with respect to these two Twitter hijacks in particular is that both the accounts that were hacked and compromised. Twitter has been contacted in both cases. It should also become a general thumb rule that ALL giveaways are fake. No one gives anyone ‘free BTCs and ETHs’.
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