Over the years, the interest of cyber criminals over crypto world has grown a lot. We saw the rise of new cyber crime niches such as cryptojacking(mining through your browser), big botnets are interfering with exchange rates and use their victims hardware for mining.
Less technical scammers start a spamming campaign similar to an upcoming ICO campaign, mostly on telegram, phishing the deposit address, whilst more technically advanced scammers hack ICO servers and replace the original deposit address with their own.
Fake Twitter account impersonating celebrities
Scammers created fake Twitter accounts, impersonating celebrities and started spamming the social network with messages calling people to participate in a fake giveaway. All the messages were similar, even though the sum of the "giveaway" and the Ethereum address was different.
"We are donating 200 Ethereum to the ETH community! First 50 transactions with 0.2 ETH sent to the address below will receive 2.0 ETH in the address the 0.2 ETH came from."
Bleeping Computer investigated into the scam campaign and came up with a list of the twitter accounts impersonating celebrities :
Elon Musk: @eonmusk, @elonnmuusk, @eIonmsuk
John McAfee: @officialnmcafee, @officialnmcafee
Vitalik Buterin: @VitallikButern, @VitallikButern
Warren Buffet: @WarrenBuffert
Coinbase: @coindase
CoinMarketCap: @coinmarketcap3
OmiseGo: @Omiise_Go
Nano Cryptocurrency: @nanocurrency
Eric Choe: @CryptoChoe_
Bleep Computers identified 8 Ethereum adresses with 7.69 Ether which is around $6,900 at the time of writing, altough the sum is higher if to consider wallets that were omited because of the suspended Twitter accounts. The most funds were received in the wallets associated with John McAfee, Vitalik Buterin, and Elon Musk.
It is a nice profit, considering that all they had to do is create fake Twitter accounts and post a few tweets.
This is just one of the many ways the crooks try to get some profit in the crypto world nowadays, so stay secure, use anti-phishing plugins and be sceptical regarding any giveaway or even airdrop hapening !