Share this article
Twitter Hack Takes Down Joe Biden, Elon Musk Accounts in Widespread Bitcoin Scam Attack
Hackers pumping a crypto giveaway scam appear to have compromised the Twitter accounts of leading exchanges, individuals and at least one news org.
By Danny Nelson
Updated Sep 14, 2021, 9:31 a.m. Published Jul 15, 2020, 7:59 p.m.
UPDATE: This is an ongoing situation. More has come to light. Click here for full coverage of the Twitter hack.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Read more: Everything We Know About the Bitcoin Scam Rocking Twitter’s Most Prominent Accounts
Read more: Obama, Biden, Netanyahu, Musk: Here’s a List of Every Hacked Twitter Account
Read more: Twitter Breach Reactions: Security Professionals Offer an Early Assessment
Read more: Chainalysis Says Bitcoin Scammed From Twitter Users Is ‘On the Move’
Read more: Twitter Says ‘Coordinated Social Engineering’ Attack Caused Bitcoin Scam
Read more: Twitter Hack Used Bitcoin to Cash In: Here’s Why
Hackers pumping a crypto giveaway scam appear to have compromised the Twitter accounts of leading exchanges, individuals and at least one news organization.
- The unknown attackers tweeted identical messages promising that they were "giving back 5000 BTC ($45,889,950) to the community" on Wednesday afternoon from the accounts of Gemini, Binance, KuCoin, Coinbase, Litecoin's Charlie Lee, Tron's Justin Sun, Bitfinex, Ripple, Cash App, Elon Musk, Uber, Apple, Kanye West, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett, Barack Obama and CoinDesk.
- The messages prompted readers to claim their rewards at an included link associated with "Crypto For Health."
- Changpeng Zhao, Binance's CEO, attempted to warn Twitter users that the Tweet was a scam within five minutes of the hack. But the attackers appear to have hidden his response and hacked him too.
- Kucoin was also targeted in the hack. CoinDesk's account was as well.
- Attempts to reach the hacked entities were not immediately successful.
- At least some of the compromised accounts have multi-factor authentication enabled, including CoinDesk's.
- The address linked to the scam appears to have received more than 11.3 BTC, or roughly $103,960.
- Shares of Twitter fell as much as 3% in after-hours trading.
More For You
What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
More For You
Solana’s Drift Launches v3, With 10x Faster Trades
With v3, the team says that about 85% of market orders will fill in under half a second, and liquidity will deepen enough to bring slippage on larger trades down to around 0.02%.
What to know:
- Drift, one of the largest perpetuals trading platforms on Solana, has launched Drift v3, a major upgrade meant to make on-chain trading feel as fast and smooth as using a centralized exchange.
- The new version will deliver 10-times faster trade execution thanks to a rebuilt backend, marking the largest performance jump the project has made so far.
Top Stories
