Crypto-currency crooks have once again been posting their scams on Twitter, using verified Twitter accounts.
Nearly every Twitter user will know what Twitter’s ‘blue tick‘ means. It shows, of course, that a particular Twitter account has been verified by Twitter as being the legitimate account of the person in question, be it a company, celebrity, blogger, journalist or anyone else deemed worthy enough of a blue tick by Twitter.
It’s often the way we know that tweets are legitimate. So if an account called Elon Musk starts posting suspicious links, and the account lacks the blue tick, we can be pretty sure it’s just an imposter account, and the links posted from it probably shouldn’t be trusted.
However, if crooks find a way of obtaining that coveted blue verification tick, then things can get a little more confusing.
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Enter into the fray Antoine Bethea, a professional American Football player. Bethea, like many sporting professionals, has a verified Twitter account. However at some point, his account was compromised and fell into the hands of crooks. How? It’s not known, but it’s likely he fell for a phishing scam that asked him to enter his details into a spoof website (and he didn’t have two-step authenticated enabled!)
Armed with a verified Twitter account under their control, the crooks changed the name of the account from Bethea’s to Elon Musk, and started tweeting out the below post –
It’s easy to see why someone who stumbles upon one of these tweets (often posted as replies to tweets by President Trump and Elon Musk’s real account) may think it’s a real tweet by the creator of Tesla and Space X and click through. The link leads to a site that simply steals Bitcoin by promising up to 100 Bitcoin in return for one 1 Bitcoin.
There are still tell-tale signs though, namely the user handle that appears after the account name. Musk’s real account is @elonmusk, while this imposter account still has Bethea’s user handle, @ABethea41.
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Twitter have changed the name back at the time of writing and removed offending tweets.
Additionally, Elon Musk’s real account really was locked down by Twitter recently due to security precautions. Musk claims it happened because of a real tweet he sent, though there is the possibility that Twitter staff may have become confused by the fake “verified” tweets and locked down his real account as a result.
This isn’t the first time this has happened. We’ve previously reported on an instance where crooks took over the verified Twitter account of a UK rugby player and started posting crytp-currency scams masquerading as President Trump.