Open Now
Open Now
Watch now

Twitter hackers appear to net $119K from bitcoin scam

Hackers appeared to rake in nearly $119,000 worth of bitcoin after they took over more than a dozen high-profile Twitter accounts Wednesday. One digital wallet linked to the unprecedented attack received about 12.8 bitcoin — worth roughly $117,328 as of Thursday afternoon — after the hackers tweeted its ID number from accounts owned by Elon …

Hackers appeared to rake in nearly $119,000 worth of bitcoin after they took over more than a dozen high-profile Twitter accounts Wednesday.

One digital wallet linked to the unprecedented attack received about 12.8 bitcoin — worth roughly $117,328 as of Thursday afternoon — after the hackers tweeted its ID number from accounts owned by Elon Musk, Kanye West, Bill Gates, Apple and others, according to data provider Blockchain.com.

Another roughly 0.17 bitcoin, or $1,625, went to a wallet mentioned in a since-deleted tweet from CashApp’s corporate Twitter account, the data show. The payment service is owned by Square, where Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey serves as CEO.

The owner of the latter account emptied it by sending all the cryptocurrency to other wallets, while the former was left with just about $119 in bitcoin after a flurry of transactions that continued into Thursday morning, records show.

The hackers’ tweets promised that anyone who sent Bitcoin to the aforementioned wallets would get twice as much money back. Twitter called the incident a “coordinated social engineering attack” that targeted company employees with access to internal tools.

Follow us on Google News

Filed under