XRP Scammers Hijacks Spanish Celebrity Twitter Account

On Sunday, a famous Spanish vocalist Bertin Osborne faced his Twitter account being hijacked by XRP scammers. Using the compromised accounts which have over 162,000 followers, hackers started posting fake XRP giveaways with phishing links.

With Osborne’s official account, the hackers were retweeting tweets from Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple Labs, and they were replying to tweets with XRP scam links to make it look legitimate. Unsuspecting social media users who click on the links and make use of it risk losing money to the scam.

Bertin’s account is one of the highest verified Twitter accounts that XRP scammers have managed to hack to date.

Twitter: a ready tool to promote crypto scams

Scammers often use public figures and celebrities to promote cryptocurrency scams, particularly Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) giveaways. They have sometimes achieved these via gaining control of the social media accounts of public figures with large followers. 

Various crypto scams are emerging on a daily basis, which gives easy access to a broad audience. Similarly, XRP giveaway scams have been popping up on social media for years and this is tarnishing the reputation of the Ripple brand.

Earlier this year, as reported by thecoinrise, a “disgruntled employee” of the Russian digital currency trading platform, Latoken, hacked the exchange’s official Twitter account and posted a lot of damning content about the platform. Although after some hours, Latoken restored access to its Twitter and deleted all the content.

Last month, a leading crypto exchange platform in India CoinDCX also experienced an exploit on its Twitter account. Hackers posted fake XRP giveaway plans with phishing links. Though it lingered for a couple of hours until CoinDCX acknowledged it.

In the same vein, XRP scammers also hacked the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Venezuela account. In the hacked Twitter account, Brad Garlinghouse advertised a big event expected to take place almost immediately after it was posted. The Tweet contained a link that encouraged potential victims to post their crypto. 

Back in July, the British Army’s verified Twitter page was compromised. The hackers used the handle with over 350K followers to retweet a number of posts promoting Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) scams.