Why a Hacker is using Elon Musk’s Name to Scam Twitter

The recent talk of Twitter has surrounded the disastrous hack of global companies such as Matalan, Pantheon Books and the latest, Pathe UK. The anonymous hacker has cleverly used Elon Musk, the infamous Tesla CEO, to trick people into the scam. Not only do they use Elon’s name and picture, they have also managed to achieve Twitter’s blue verification tick, making people believe that their scam is real.

Using promoted tweets, from which Twitter receive money to advertise, the scam offers a great deal to a massive audience. The tweet asks users to give out a fraction of Bitcoin with the promise that they will receive much more in return. They have also hacked several other verified accounts in order to reply to the tweet to spread the word and claim that the scam is legitimate. In addition to this, the account retweets a number of Elon Musk and Tesla’s tweets in an effort to look real.

While the hacker has been extremely smart to use a verified account in order to spread this scam, the tweet still contained many ‘classic scam’ errors that may have put off users from offering money. They also failed to change the twitter accounts handle, showing the hacked companies name instead of Elon Musk’s. Although, even with these errors, the scammer managed to gain 28 Bitcoin from nearly 400 twitter users, which is almost £140,000.

Twitter has had to rapidly respond to these incidents and ensure that they do not happen again. “In recent weeks, user impressions have fallen by a multiple of 10 as we continue to invest in more proactive tools to detect spammy and malicious activity. This is a significant improvement on previous action rates,” Twitter told ZDNet.

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Twitter have been so strict with tackling these scams that they even locked Elon Musk out of his own Twitter! Musk had heard his name so frequently that he decided to tweet out a parody of the scam joking to Twitter users that they should buy some Bitcoin. Twitter assumed that Elon Musk had been hacked by a scammer and quickly locked him out of his account.