Owners of a fake YouTube channel impersonating MicroStrategy head Michael Saylor duped an unknown user out of 26 BTC (over $1.1 million), according to the Whale Alert bot.
🚔 A payment of 26 #BTC (1,124,191 USD) was just made to a confirmed Michael Saylor Giveaway scam!https://t.co/YNYRBLBt4P
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) January 15, 2022
Posing as Saylor, the scammers promised to ‘double’ any amount sent to the specified address in cryptocurrency. The user made five separate transactions.
“Last week, 489 such fraudulent channels were launched on YouTube. We report them every 15 minutes; they are taken down after a few hours, but the scammers launch more,” wrote Saylor in his verified Twitter account.
489 of these scams were launched on YouTube last week. We report them every 15 minutes and they are taken down after a few hours, but the scammers just launch more…
— Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) January 16, 2022
In December 2021, the attackers hacked the personal Twitter account of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and, from his account, posted about the legalisation of Bitcoin in the country.
A year earlier, his account was also hacked — at that time unknown individuals posted a fake appeal to transfer funds into cryptocurrency.
Previously, the accounts of Elon Musk, Bill Gates and other celebrities were targeted in a large-scale attack. In March 2021, the hacker Graham Clarke was sentenced to three years in prison with a subsequent probation.
In 2021, cryptocurrency scammers earned a record $14 billion, according to analytics firm Chainalysis.
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