ODM Party director of communications has suffered a loss of his Twitter account.
“Our Director of Communication Philip Etale’s Twitter account EtalePhilip has reportedly been hacked by unknown persons. This happened less than thirty minutes ago. We urge Kenyans on Twitter and the general public to treat any information posted on the handle with contempt,” ODM Party’s official handle tweeted.
Philip Etale’s account was hacked about two hours ago by the time of this writing.
His account appears to have been hacked by cryptocurrency scammers who have changed the profile to that of the founder and CEO of the largest crypto exchange in the world by volume Binance, Changpeng Zhao (@CZ_Binance).
Hacking and crypto scamming
It is not a new phenomenon. Countless accounts are hacked each day by crypto scammers who swindle people off their hard-earned (do I say hard HODLED) crypto assets.
They often target verified accounts since posts from such are easy to believe.
In 2020, a major hack happened.
World billionaires and influential people like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Jef Bezos, Barack Obama briefly lost their accounts to crypto scammers who fleeced people off Sh0.8 billion before the hack was contained.
A hacker exploited Twitter’s text-to-tweet service which the accounts were using and posted their Bitcoin address promisijg to send back twice as much as received.
5,314 people fell for the scam and sent these hackers $7.8M USD (Sh800 million).
Graham Ivan Clar, a 17-year-old from Florida, USA was arrested for that hack.
“He’s a 17 year-old kid who apparently just graduated high school,” said State Attorney Andrew Warren. “But no make no mistake, this was not an ordinary 17-year-old. This was a highly sophisticated attack on a magnitude not seen before.”
Clark’s scheme was to steal the identities of prominent people, then post messages in their names directing victims to send Bitcoin to accounts he owned.
Bitcoin is the first, most valuable, most stable (unhackable) cryptocurrency created by the psedonymous Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009.
One bitcoin is currently priced at Sh2.3 million.
