Tesco’s Twitter Account Hacked, Scammers Offer Double The Amount of Bitcoins To Senders

By Prashant Jha

Tesco, which happens to be the largest of all supermarket chains in the United Kingdom found its Twitter account being compromised by hackers who evidently tried to pull off a Bitcoin scam. The hackers, having changed the Twitter handle to “Billagatesmsc” after the founder of Microsoft, addressed the existing followers of Tesco, numbering to nearly 550,000. They told these members of the Twitteratti that if they would send them some bitcoins in a specific address, they would get back double the amount. For experienced members of the crypto-verse, this was clearly a classic scam and thankfully, nobody fell prey to it.

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When Tesco lost control of its account, the avatar associated with the account changed to a picture of Bill Gates, perhaps suggesting one would be as rich as him if they decided to give in to the demands of those running the account.

The message posted on the account seemed to be quite similar to those that had been posted for the slew of Ethereum scams that had taken over Twitter last year. One of the deleted tweets read:

“Bitcoin is on the rise again! One day, it will without doubt replace fiat currencies.I’d like to give back to the community, therefore any bitcoin you send to this address, I will send back double! Comment your BTC address below when done.”

Thankfully, the address that was provided by the attackers was not supplied with Bitcoins by any gullible crypto enthusiast, nor did it send any to anyone.

Soon, Tesco managed to retake control of the account and deleted all the tweets sent out by the scammers. The timing of this hack seems to be quite interesting, especially considering how Bitcoin has been experiencing a bull run unprecedented since December of 2017.

The scammers were possibly trying to take advantage of the fact that there is an increased interest in Bitcoin in the wake of the rising prices, as this might have induced some people to take part in the scam in the hope of maximizing earnings.

Prashant Jha

As a content writer Prashant believes in presenting complex topics in simple laymen terms. He is a tech enthusiast and an avid reader.

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