On Thursday, Kevin O’Leary had his Twitter account hacked, which was then used for promoting a giveaway scam involving Bitcoin and Ethereum.
The scammers invited everyone to participate and said that Mr. Wonderful was giving away 15,000 ETH tokens and 5,000 bitcoins.
Fake giveaway
Shark Tank star, Kevin O’Leary found his official Twitter account compromised on Thursday morning, as it was promoting a giveaway involving BTC and ETH tokens.
It was first tweeted that O’Leary had managed to generate a lot of returns from crypto over the years due to which he had decided to do the giveaway involving 5,000 BTC and 15,000 ETH tokens.
The tweet in question also contained a link that people could use for participating in the crypto giveaway scam.
Moreover, the official account of Mr. Wonderful also asserted that the giveaway was definitely not a scam and the account had not been hacked.
It also added that Mr. O’Leary himself had talked on CNBC the night before about doing a crypto giveaway, so it was all very real.
The first tweet that contained the link took people to a website that has been presented as the official website for the bitcoin and ether giveaway organized by Mr. O’Leary.
The scam
The website said that anyone could participate in the giveaway, including people based in the United States.
There were two more links given, one that was aimed at leading people to the Bitcoin giveaway and the second one to the Ether (ETH) giveaway.
A few hours after the fake giveaway posts were made, Twitter removed them from the platform. These crypto giveaway scams are certainly not a new idea, as they have taken place on many social media platforms.
They have been carried out on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube as well as Instagram. Scammers usually hack the accounts of celebrities, politicians, companies, or famous people for promoting fake giveaways.
These scams often feature Elon Musk, along with his companies Spacex and Tesla.
The O’Leary scam
As a matter of fact, the same website was used in the O’Leary scam that had been created for the fake Elon Musk and Tesla giveaways.
The giveaway site for the O’Leary scam also had comments that thanked Musk for sending some BTC. The pages for the BTC and ETH giveaways also had the logo of Tesla on top.
In addition, they were also hosted on a website, which had a URL that contained the name Tesla. A huge number of Twitter accounts had been hacked back in July 2020 for promoting a bitcoin giveaway.
These included accounts of Mike Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Apple, Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Floyd Mayweather, Joe Biden, Warren Buffett, Uber, Mr. Beast, Google, and Kanye West.
More recently, the account of Imran Khan, a Pakistani politician, was also used for promoting a giveaway scam that also featured Elon Musk.
The official Twitter and YouTube accounts of the British Army were also compromised for promoting a bitcoin giveaway back in July.
