Celebrity Twitter Accounts Are Falling Victim To This Crypto Scam: Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Uber, etc

What's up, everyone? We are coming to you live from Cointelegraph. I'm Jackson, I'm here with Giovanni and we are going to report on some breaking news going on in Twitter.

Right now.

We are experiencing one of the biggest hacks in Twitter history and one of the biggest scams. So earlier tonight, or today, depending on your time zone, Justin Tron's account was first hacked. And there was a tweet going around on his account that was asking people to send him bitcoin and he would return the amount for double that amount in bitcoin. And since then, a number of hacks have been carried out throughout notable names in crypto, including CZ and other notable names, including Kanye West, Warren Buffett, Mr. Beast, Jeff Bezos. Kanye actually has hacked twice. Elon Musk was hacked twice. Obama was also hacked. Wendy's, of all people, Joe Biden. So this is a big pervasive thing. And the thing that's tying all of these scams together is that they're all asking for bitcoin donations.

So what we know so far is that they all send. I mean, the bitcoin that was asked was sent to a specific address which so far received 12 Bitcoin. So basically this address that is being posted on these fake messages received 12 bitcoins so far. So if you see that address, don't send bitcoin to that address.

Of course, yeah, a lot of these different Twitter posts have been using the same address actually, and they've been asking people to send bitcoin to these addresses. And how many transactions have there been so far?

So so far it's 327 transactions that were made for a total of 12.3 Bitcoin sent to this address. And apparently the posts that are made on Twitter are being erased after a few minutes. But some of these addresses were hacked multiple times. Like for example, Elon Musk was hacked again a few minutes ago and it's happening with many of them. So this is probably one of the biggest scam in the history of Twitter. And so, yeah, we are following the event very closely and see what are going to be the reactions.

Yeah, it's still unclear who is behind these hacks. Justin Tron has actually offered a $1 million bounty to anyone who can track the hackers. So we're hoping to find out soon who is actually behind these hacks. And we're keeping up to date on who is getting hacked because these are just happening right now. And these started about two to three hours ago. And it has taken Twitter about two to three hours actually, to make any sort of response to.

Actually, we got just now a first update from Twitter who says, we are aware of security incident impacting accounts on Twitter. We are investigating and taking steps to fix it. We will update everyone shortly. So we got some first response from Twitter itself. But, yeah, I think that these guys acted pretty swiftly and they managed to hack an incredible amount of very important accounts. So this is massive.

I think this is massive.

And it's still going on. Even though these tweets are getting taken down very rapidly by the accounts that are being hacked, they are still recurring. Again, as Giovanni mentioned, you know, Kanye's account has been hacked twice. Elon Musk's account has also been hacked twice. So these are recurring hacks. And just be aware, you know, like, if you see someone asking if you're a famous person with a lot of followers asking to send you a lot of bitcoin, be wary about that because it is likely a hack. And Scott Melker actually brought up an interesting point, which was that this is not a great look for the crypto community. The fact that scammers are using bitcoin to profit from these kinds of scams.

It's basically promoting the idea that crypto is only used by criminals for nefarious purposes. The argument that many people still hold this can be harmful for the reputation of crypto. But I see another tweet by Matthew Greenspan, who is also discussing this issue. He says bitcoin wasn't hacked. Twitter was. So I guess this is an issue of whether we want to see it as a problem of Twitter more than a problem of bitcoin itself.

Yeah, and unfortunately, bitcoin was the medium used for this scam. And one of the things that's interesting about bitcoin is that actually these transactions can be traced. So we should be able to follow the money as it's moved through accounts. We know the account address that it was sent to. It's very clear. They posted it in a number of these tweets, including ones from Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Apple, Kanye, cz, Justin Tron, like, all of these people, they're using similar bitcoin address. So we should be able to follow the money as it moves to different addresses. We'll see if they use a mixer or not, which will make it more difficult to track. But as far as bitcoin goes, we should be able to trace them. And it's important to reiterate, you know, there have been no resolution to the hacks yet we don't know who's behind them. Again, Justin Tron has offered a $1 million bounty to whoever can figure out and track who is behind these hacks. So this is still an ongoing and developing situation. We were trying to figure out what's going on behind it, and hopefully later on we can get some commentary from Tron, from a spokesperson from Tron, maybe.

From Binance as well.

Yeah, we're also going to get someone from Binan as well to comment on the hacks. So make sure you guys stay tuned for that.

I see right now a funny post by Richard Hart who says, wouldn't it be funny if the hackers are smart enough to get everyone's BTC, but stupid enough to deposit it on one of the exchanges they hacked? So I'm quite doubtful that these guys are that stupid.

Well, they were smart enough to hack some of the most prolific Twitter accounts out there, so of course. So it would be surprising if they blow it all away by trading it off on Binance Exchange.

And by the way, let's keep an eye on the value of Twitter stocks tomorrow as soon as the markets are going to reopen, because this is potentially going to be tremendously impactful on the price of Twitter stocks.

Yeah. So Twitter today closed at up 3, 3.75% on the day. So it'll be really interesting to see what will happen to Twitter tomorrow when the market reopens. Is there going to be some kind of crash? It'll be really interesting to see what kind of large impact these scams have if people are really paying attention to it.

So 12 BTC so far. How much is that in dollars?

So I think bitcoin's sitting around 9,000 right now. I can check it real quick. But if it's at night, if it's at 9,000, then, I mean, you can.

Just type like 12 Bitcoin. Well, yeah, just to figure out how much that.

Well, I mean, okay, yeah, so it's about 11 right now, $110,000, almost $111,000 worth of Bitcoin, and it's been two.

Hours ago or something like that.

Yeah. So these hacks started two to three hours ago. Justin Tron's was the first account to be hacked. And since then we've had other notable names in crypto like CZ and many just widespread names like Kanye. He's been hacked twice. Elon Musk, hacked twice. Also Warren Buffet, Wiz Khalifa, Mr. Beast, Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg. I mean, everyone's experiencing the Force of this.

Yeah.

And actually this is a good point that Gabor Gurbaks brings up. Right now it's tens of millions of new people may learn about bitcoin because of this hack. This is incredible. This is basically, yeah, this is not the way we wanted bitcoin to go mainstream, basically. But of course a lot of these personalities will never tweet about bitcoin like Obama, Warren Buffett. These people don't have anything to do with bitcoin. But now they are basically spreading information about bitcoin. I mean, this is not the right way to make people aware of bitcoin, but paradoxically, we are seeing that. It's crazy.

Yeah, it's a bit of a silver lining, isn't it? Apologies if you're hearing some sort of notifications going on during the stream. Not exactly sure where that's coming from.

So.

But yeah, so the problem is that.

It was already two hours ago and still no solution from Twitter, which means that this thing can going on for I don't know how long, but it can provoke, it can cause a lot.

Of harm and it will be interesting to see how long it continues for. I mean, it seems that a lot of these accounts are very on top of the scam already. We're seeing these tweets be deleted as soon as they come up. If you go on the pages, you'll notice that you can't find any evidence that the tweets actually existed before. So it's great that the accounts are on top of deleting these tweets and they're already very aware of it, but interesting to see who pops up next. And you know, it's really surprising that this has been such a pervasive attack. I mean, the fact that they've been able to hack not only like the names in crypto, but also the likes of like Obama, presidential candidate Joe Biden, you know, the ever present social media guru Wendy's, and even God on Twitter, even God got hacked by these bitcoin scammers.

And also major companies like Apple and Uber got hit by the same hack.

Yeah.

So not just personal accounts, but also big companies accounts.

So no one is escaping. So yeah, I mean if you're not aware of bitcoin, you should probably take a look at what it is and why people have decided to use it for scams. Bitcoin has actually, it's gotten a bad rep in the past for being used for nefarious activities. But contrary to popular belief, Bitcoin is actually traceable. You can trace where bitcoin moves through wallets, everything is visible on the blockchain. It's actually pseudonymous, which means that even though you don't have to link your identity to a wallet, you can still see every movement the money makes through different wallet addresses. All transactions are on the blockchain. So, um, it's actually not very difficult to trace where money moves. And one of the things that hackers can do to disguise the way money moves is they can send Bitcoin through mixers which will spread out the bitcoin across multiple different wallets and transactions and make it very difficult to trace individual pieces of those Bitcoin. But again, like, it's all traceable. So it'll be interesting to see where these, this scammed bitcoin ends up and how the hackers will potentially try to liquidate that bitcoin.

Yeah, and by the way, Jackson, we have Ryan Dennis, CMO of tron, who is ready to join us to discuss the bounty, to discuss the whole situation. So, looking forward to it.

Yeah. Hopefully he'll be joining us in just a few minutes. We're just waiting on him to get, to get with us. Bitcoin price has not reacted so far. It is still holding around the 9200 mark. So so far this news hasn't affected bitcoin.

Let's see tomorrow which one gets more impacted by this event, the price of bitcoin or the stock price of Twitter? And we'll see, like, how the blame is going to be balancing between the two.

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see. I'm sure people are much more aware of Twitter, so it'll probably attract a.

Bit more attention, but maybe bitcoin will skyrocket.

Yeah, that would be the most absurd scenario where Twitter just plummets and bitcoin, on the other hand, just skyrockets. I don't know if that's like, necessarily.

A good thing, but can you imagine that? Actually, a lot of people that are going to see those messages, like from Obama, from all these people that don't have anything to do with crypto, they are going to buy, maybe they're going to buy crypto specifically for sending them to these addresses. That would be crazy. Like a lot of crypto adoption just because of that.

I mean, yeah, again, silver linings. I mean, obviously getting hacked and scammed is not your best, not, not the best thing to happen, but if it raises awareness, then at least something good will come out of it. So it looks like we've got on the line Ryan Dennis from Tron. Thanks for joining us today. Ryan, what's going on?

Thank you for having me. I think what's going on is something that is actually not new to us. Cryptocurrency people on Twitter have been subject to scams and the like from various parties on Twitter for years now. I mean, remember when Vitalik came on and said he changed his name to not giving away eth because there were all of those clone accounts. Twitter has ignored this festive crypto community and these hackers have.

First become aware of.

We just became aware of it around maybe two or three hours ago, and we thought something was wrong with the privacy settings. But it's funny that when we saw Justin's. Justin was one of the first ones, obviously, right along with CZ and Binance. And when we saw it was with CZ and Binance, it's almost like, oh, it's okay. It's not just us, right, that we got hacked. But then when you see everybody else, it just started to snowball and become ridiculous.

Do you remember how you noticed? Did you, like, just go on your page and see it? Or did someone send you a message being like, hey, there's this weird thing on your page? Or how did you actually figure out that you were hacked?

Yeah, we take very, very serious parameters over the accounts on social media. Obviously, that's the heart of Tron's marketing. Right. And every crypto community is on Twitt. So we have a 247 team that just does social listening and analytics. And when I got pinged, I knew right away there was something wrong because I got pinged by four people at the same time from different parties within the Tron ecosystem. So we immediately submitted tickets to get the accounts back. We woke Justin up in the middle of the night in his sleep. For him to reset his personal account, additional damage could have been done. Intent to pay a bound evidence in the tools. So they're shutting down all the tools at Twitter right now, and it seems like it's getting out of control. But we take very seriously the work that we do with regard to social media security. We're good at keeping those accounts secure. We've never had an issue like this before. We follow Twitter's best practices, and we're working with Twitter right now to resolve the issue. But it shows the need for further decentralization. Even the most powerful and influential companies in the world subject themselves to harm without decentralized software at the heart of their infrastructure.

So regarding the possibility to trace those hackers, do you think it's doable. Like, do you. Do you think it's something that can be done, like maybe following the movements of the bitcoin that are being sent to this account?

I mean, we hope so, right? This is why we are working together and we're working so steadily to get an immediate change together. But I think the whole world needs to tackle this problem. Right? We're starting to realize that centralized services and the inability to track what's going on and be able to have one central point of failure really highlights the need for decentralized technology. So this problem, if it doesn't get solved right away and we lose Twitter, we. Where is the conversation going to go? Where are people going to be chatting and living around on social media? Right. The number one place for conversation is Twitter. That's where the President of the United States tweets. Right? So to me, this is an opportunity for us to say, why do we live this way? Why do we subject ourselves to this? We can't even track down this person. So we're very serious about finding out who is at the bottom of this and affecting and also putting a bad name on a cryptocurrency such as bitcoin. We love bitcoin. Justin sun has talked about bitcoin many times about being the pioneer of our industry. Right. So we want to look out for the interests of all the potential cryptocurrency advocates and users. And this really puts a damper on the way people look at cryptocurrency. So if we can come in and save the day and save Twitter in any way, shape or form to lead to that evidence and tracking it, please reach out to us and let us know.

By the way, just 11 minutes ago, Kim Kardashian also got hacked, and she's posting the same BTC address. Did you already have Kim Kardashian among our in our list?

Not yet.

Not yet. Okay, so it's a new one.

But since she's the wife of Kanye, it was only logical that she would be next in line. So have you been removing the tweets? As soon as they come up. I mean, we've seen that Kanye's got hacked twice. I think Elon Musk got hacked twice as well. Have there been any, like, second or third hacks? Have been just watching it closely to make sure nothing comes up again.

You know, it's funny, we spoke with. We're close with a lot of people at Twitter as we can be right. With account managers, but they're all out and about. No one can reach Anyone. But when we submitted our tickets and tried to reach out to our personal contacts, we spoke with the Twitter employee and heard the hack is currently targeting verified Twitter accounts mainly, but they are getting some unverified accounts as well. They just said they're putting out fires. Right. And they haven't found out the cause of the problem. They're currently doing their best in removing all the pinned messages posted by hackers, but when it comes to verified accounts, this seems to be a real dim witted hack. It seems like the real opportunity would have been to put on a scam for stock, traditional stocks, rather than cryptocurrency. They haven't gotten.

Mine was sent to that address. Why do you think the. The amount is still not that big? I mean, looking at the amount of followers that these accounts have, I would expect probably a much bigger sum to be sent to those addresses.

Well, my inference would be we're all living online right now, right? Everybody's shelter in place. You guys need to social distance a little bit more, but you're doing great, I'm sure. But you know, everybody's online, right. If we were out and about, if I was on my way to the train, on my way home from work today at this time, I wouldn't have gotten that message until later. Everybody would be scattered. But because everybody's online, I think everybody's seeing the articles and getting word of this and kind of halting their processes, of course, right now and just looking at the conversation. And the problem here is not whether or not that many people will get hacked. Anybody who sent money to these accounts, they are learning a lesson. Anybody who's been in crypto for more than three or five years has learned that you will make a mistake at some point. And that's the importance of cryptocurrency education and blockchain education at an early level. And everybody is getting their rights of passage right now and their tiger stripes, so to speak, for getting burned. That did send it. But most people I think are saying, skirt, something's wrong here. We need to find a solution and we need to find it now.

Yeah, so a lot of people have been talking about, you know, what the potential impact is on the image of Kurt crypto. And people are pointing out, you know, obviously this could be a negative thing, bitcoin being used to promote a scam. But. And then on the other hand, promoting are observing the silver lining, which means, you know, oh, all of a sudden all these other people have heard about bitcoin, they might look into it and it Might lead to more adoption, yada, yada, yada. Do you think this is an overall negative look for bitcoin, or do you think this will actually lead to some sort of positive effect?

I think it's all positive. Of course. Everybody in the world today is talking about bitcoin. Everybody in the world today is talking about cryptocurrency for one day. When was the last time this happened? It was when bitcoin boomed up to $20,000. You guys remember that? We all do. It was a historic day. Even people outside of cryptocurrency have heard about it. And that's why it's so important that just as soon as we're excited that bitcoin and crypto is finally getting its place in the sky, we also want to highlight the need for people to know that we care about the users and interested parties, which is why we're very serious about getting to the bottom of this. So Justin sun, the CEO of BitTorrent and founder of Tron, is doing this bounty because we know that traditional centralized software companies are not going to be able to update their archaic servers in time to prevent this from happening again. It's time, now that people hear about it, we get to the bottom of it. And they see that people in cryptocurrency are not just here to shill their coin and and to get money, but to help prevent others from being taken advantage of. Not just like traditional finance, where no one teaches you about finance until you've graduated from, you know, getting a master's degree in finance, they don't teach you anything about it in traditional schooling because it's all a big secret. In crypto. We want all the best information and tools to be out there. So now is the time for us to show the best of crypto that we can react as quickly as the hackers can attack and we can be there to help people. And right now, I think, you know, it's all important that we all say, yeah, people are learning about bitcoin. You're learning about the good and you're learning about the bad at the same time. So if you are a bitcoin enthusiast, if you're a crypto enthusiast, right now everybody's talking about it today. Today is the day to talk to your grandma, your cousin, and your family and friends about bitcoin and about cryptocurrency, about TRX in the right way. This is always live at the heart of Tron Foundation's mission to bring blockchain to everyone, for everyone. And that's why these attacks can take place is because we're not educating people on what crypto is really about. But now's our time to shine and do right by our community.

By the way, talking about this centralization problem you were mentioning before, apparently Twitter have blocked all the blue checks account from tweeting right now.

Wait, all of the blue checks, all the verified accounts?

Yeah, all the blue checked accounts seem to be blocked from tweeting. We have like, this tweet from Twitter support to say you may be unable to tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident. And there are already some kind of outraged reactions from many people on Twitter who are complaining about this centralized way of Twitter to apparently react to these incidents. So by blocking automatically most all the accounts, apparently. So this is something unprecedented, I guess. I never heard something like that happened before.

Yeah, just like a total lockdown. Yeah. So actually, it'll be really curious to see. We've been speculating about this a little bit. What will happen to Twitter's stock price tomorrow when the markets reopen. There's kind of this. We're curious to see where the blame game's gonna end up. You know, are people gonna blame Bitcoin or are people gonna blame Twitter? You know, like, where does that. Where do you think the fault lies on this one?

The fault lies 100% in our resting on our laurels and depending on centralized solutions. I mean, what is the point of us all paying taxes and voting the way that we do? You know, for example, today's tax day. I mean, what's more mystical than that? Today is the day when we all have to use our archaic practices in order to file paperwork that a system already has. There's a central point of failure in the IRS as well, because we're all sending our personal information to one point. When is this going to happen to the irs? When is it going to happen to the CIA? This is an extremely serious moment for us as human beings to come together and say, hey, how can we actually figure out a better way? Does it exist? Yes, it exists. There is no amount of money or influence that can make a centralized server as secure as a simple blockchain anywhere. I mean, especially something as easy to use as Tron's blockchain. But it goes for blockchain people in general. We know that. This is why we're interested in this space. It doesn't make any sense to us why we depend on these simple servers. Now is the time for us to decentralize voting for us to decentralize healthcare for us to use these services. And that's why we have had in our mission from day one to bring blockchain to everyone through these use cases. Right? And this is the point. It's not just for making games. It's not just for showing what our fancy bleeding edge technology can do. It's to protect people. Blockchain and bitcoin started basically because people were angry at situations exactly like this where there's a single point of failure, whether it be negligence, whether it be greed, where people can take advantage of many others. We all remember the Wall street problem and why bitcoin was born. So this still lies at the fact that we have not faced this problem head on. When are we going to demand that our services and our leaders say hey, these attacks can take place anytime on centralized company's archaic servers and senselessly subject users to harm. So hopefully we learn from the mistakes of others and ourselves in the past and we continue to provide decentralized solutions for the world, which is what Tron is trying to do every single day.

Yes. Still I think that this is going to likely be used as a double, double sword, how to say double edged sword.

Double edged sword.

Because I think that a lot of people would blame still bitcoin as the typical source of scam, source of this kind of frauds. And they will spin these events in a way to how to say, to how to throw some negative image on bitcoin. And you are framing this event.

As.

An event which helps decentralization to prove its, its reason of existence. But I expect of course other sources to use it in a different way tomorrow. Like blaming bitcoin, blaming this whole space as a source of probably scam.

And that's why it's important that we don't just sit down and wait for them to spin that. Now is your time to step up and say not only am I an expert in technology and blockchain and these fun projects, but I'm an expert on decentralization and distributed tech and here's why it matters. We all need to stop becoming enthusiasts and become advocates. We can take this opportunity and just say yeah, we'll listen to whatever CNBC says. But is the scam that people are using bitcoin? Of course not. How many people who are being scammed today actually even own any bitcoin? We met Warren Buffett in Omaha, Nebraska. He'd not, he's not interested in it. Right. So how many people that are following him are actually gonna open up their finance or their TRX wallet and try to actually send this account. Crypto, not that many. The problem and the damage is not in this, you know, dim witted scammer trying to take people's bitcoin. I don't think that's where the damage is gonna be done. I think the damage is gonna be just on Twitter themselves. They'll take all the blame, especially for their security services. But anybody that's interested in why this happened will know that, listen, people who are interested in bitcoin, even the dark side bitcoin, they're smarter than a security system at a company like Twitter. Big tech needs to wake up. Now's the time you need to partner with an enterprise ready blockchain system, just like Tron, blockchain and the like, by the way.

Now we are at 12.8 bitcoins. Enter the address and 35,3 transactions. So it's still pretty slow in attracting new transactions, but apparently we have the whole night long or all day long, wherever you are in the time zones.

We're ready. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Ryan. Really appreciate your insight.

Thanks Ryan.

Yeah, thanks for giving us that look at what's going on behind the scenes with Tron right now.

Thanks guys. You take care and good luck to your Twitter profile. Hopefully you don't get hacked.

So fire.

You too.

You too.

Yeah, stay safe out there.

Thanks. Bye. Bye, bye.

All right, so it's been quite an exciting few hours now. Just to recap what's going on on Twitter. So about two, I think maybe three, three and a half hours ago, the scam started. And essentially what the scams were were the hackers took over famous people's Twitter account, starting with the crypto space, namely Justin, Tron and CZ and Binance. And they were essentially asked people to send them money and then in return they would give them double the amount. And these scams quickly spread throughout the entire Twitter community. Kanye got hit, Obama got hit, Warren Buffett, Wiz Khalifa, Mr. Beef, Jeff Bezos, Apple, Elon Musk, Wendy's, Joe Biden. God, all of these people got hit with these scams.

So probably one of the biggest scams or maybe the biggest scams in Twitter's history. Unprecedented. It's going to have like a huge impact on Twitter reputation. And yeah, the security basically proved to be failable. And yeah, so the bitcoin were sent to one specific bitcoin address which so far received around 12.8 bitcoin for around like over 300 transactions were made to that address. So it's still be seen how these hackers are going to move the bitcoin around since bitcoin is traceable, so we can follow all the transactions moving from that address. It is still unclear how the hackers actually managed to perform this hack. And after the response from Twitter came only after around two hours from the accident. And apparently they have blocked all the blue ticked addresses. So to stop them sending out those tweets. Quite radical measure that a lot of people are already complaining about because of course it's interpreted as a censorship movement. But I guess that, you know, at a certain, I guess that situation got pretty bad and that was pretty much probably the only thing that was left to be done.

Yeah, yeah. So essentially as Giovanni said, you know, the scam crisis escalated so far that Twitter literally locked people out of verified accounts. If you have a verified account, you can no longer tweet, according to Twitter. And I'm inferring that this is for the safety of the users so that no one can promote any of more of these scams, because if they can't tweet, they can't promote the scams. Though obviously if the hackers managed to hack into all of these accounts, maybe they'd be able to bypass that lockout, but who knows.

What we still don't know is what kind of impact this is going to have on the reputation of crypto and the reputation of Twitter and the reputation of Twitter. But I mean, in this case, remember guys, we had accounts that don't have anything to do with crypto, that will never tweet anything about crypto or bitcoin, like Obama, like Joe Biden, like Elon Musk of course tweeted about crypto. But for example, Mike Bloomberg, these people have huge amount of followers and these people, these followers today found out for the first time about bitcoin and crypto. So this is going to have a quite remarkable impact also on the knowledge regarding crypto. Maybe in a certain way it's going to be even positive. If a hack of disproportion can be, can have some positive sides, of course.

Well, it's interesting to note that obviously the hackers had, they were able to hack into one of, one of the biggest, if not the largest social media platform that we have today. And what they chose to do with that was to ask people to send them bitcoin. I think that's worth taking note of. I mean, of all the things they could have done by hacking into all of these people's platforms, they chose to publicize bitcoin. It's a very interesting tactic and obviously one that wasn't super successful. I mean, they only got over 300 transactions sent to them, having like over 12 Bitcoin, which came out to around $111,000 something around then, which, I mean, it's a lot of money, but it's not an exorbitant amount of money. So it seems like this was more of a statement than anything else. You know, like we could do this and we decided that bitcoin was going to be one of the focal points of it, which is really interesting to think about.

Yeah. And also I think that as you pointed out, this hack is going to have much more of a information reputational impact than a financial one. Like, the amount of money that got hacked so far is limited, but I think that the impact in terms of reputation and knowledge is enormous.

Well, the financial impact could be quite interesting. I think. Obviously the US Stock market is closed today, so we have yet to see the effects of this news on Twitter stock. So I would say keep your eye open to see what happens when Twitter reopens, when the stock market reopens tomorrow. Because we could see some drastic movements on Twitter stock and potentially also some drastic movements in bitcoin, depending to see what happens. It'll be really interesting to see which direction both of those go. Maybe Twitter will go down, maybe bitcoin will go down. Maybe bitcoin will go up while Twitter goes down. I mean, who knows what's going to happen, honestly?

Yeah. And by the way, we have also good news. The account of Cointelegraph was not hacked.

There's a good reason for that as well.

That put us in a kind of uncomfortable position because it looks like, okay, everybody was acting except us, but we swear we are not behind the hacking.

It's just because we're not verified.

So.

Do we have any other guests coming up soon?

I think that we're going to actually have our head of social media who's going to be on to talk about or who's going to analyze the Twitter space right now, give us some updates on what's going on over there, see what's happening. Again, tons of some of the most popular Twitter figures are being hacked, including presidential candidate Joe Biden, the ever favorable Elon Musk. Wendy's the biggest name out there. Mike Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, Kanye Warren Buffett, Wiz Khalifa, Kim Kardashian. All of these people have gotten hacked. They've had this bitcoin address put up there. People have been actually Sending bitcoin to the bitcoin address that has been posted on these people's Twitter's accounts. So this is a widespread scam, the biggest scam attack in Twitter history, definitely the biggest one involving bitcoin.

And we still have to figure out how technically this was performed because the Twitter account is trying. The Twitter service is trying to figure out how this happened, but they still didn't provide any clear information. By the way, we have Peter Schiff tweeting about what happened. And of course, as probably a lot of other people are using this event to spin the story against bitcoin. So Peter Ship says it looks like all verified Twitter accounts have been hacked by someone running a bitcoin scam. For once, not being verified has its advantages. I wonder if this is a harbinger of bitcoin itself being hacked. Better to play it safe and just buy gold. That's, of course something expected from Peter Schiff, who of course promotes gold all the time against digital gold.

Yeah, well, it brings up again the question of where is the blame for this to be put? Obviously, bitcoin is the medium of the hack. The hackers are trying to scam people out of bitcoin, but Twitter is the platform that got hacked. So it's interesting to see where people will allocate the blame. Will they blame bitcoin for being the. The medium? Or they blame Twitter for being insecure and not able to protect its users from these kinds of scams.

Yeah, and by the way, most of the conversation about bitcoin, of course, going on on Twitter. Twitter is the major platform where the conversation about crypto and bitcoin is going on. So what will happen tomorrow when Twitter will not be more considered as a secure place? Will the conversation move to some other platforms? Maybe something more decentralized platform? We were discussing with a Tron representative just a few minutes before and he was making a good point that probably people now are more aware of the need for decentralization and will move away from centralized platforms like Twitter, which can be easily used in such a way to wreak havoc on the community.

And again, for those of you who don't know, Twitter has actually locked out all. Let me repeat that. All verified members of Twitter from making any sorts of posts. So if you have that blue check by your name, you cannot post anything to Twitter. And this is ostensibly for the safety of the people on Twitter so that these scams don't circulate anymore, so that the hackers can't post any more of these tweets on these verified users platforms. And you know, it's a really crazy measure that they've taken. They've just locked everyone out of a voice right now. And it's, there's, there's two sides to this coin. You know, on the one hand, safety is a priority and making sure people and making sure the users are protected is a priority. On the other hand, you know.

Just.

Locking out everyone because a few people have been targeted is a very extreme measure. So it really is unprecedented, I think, in the history of Twitter for this sort of thing to happen.

And we have already some, how do you say, some polls that are being posted. Like for example, Dan Held, the head of business development at Kraken, already posted a tweet because he's not a verified account. So he can still tweet apparently saying, is this good or bad for bitcoin? Yes. No. So you can vote.

Yeah. Head over there and give us your vote. Dan Hell was recently featured on our YouTube channel. You should check out that interview. It's quite interesting. He thought bitcoin could go to a million.

So I'm pretty sure what he will vote in that post.

Yeah, he's a big bitcoin fanatic for sure. Twitter has not been able to discover who is behind these hacks at all. They said they are aware of the security incident and they're actively trying to sort it out, but they have not been able to offer any more than that. So it is still unclear who is behind these hacks. Bitcoin is now trending on Twitter, which is understandable. And Justin Tron has offered a $1 million bounty to anyone who can track, who can track the hackers. And we recently had on a spokesperson from Tron who was explaining the importance how Tron feels about social media platforms, the importance of Twitter to crypto. Obviously crypto is a huge, I mean, Twitter is a huge hub for crypto. A lot of people get their trading advice there. There's always so much discussion over the main crypto narratives on Twitter. Twitter is a huge platform for crypto. So it's important that we maintain this space and if it can't be maintained that we find a new one. But hopefully it won't come to that.

And yeah, it would be pretty interesting to count the amount of total followers that came in touch to these messages because if you put together all the followers of all these people that got hacked, it's a huge amount, like it's millions, hundreds of millions of people that received that message or potentially saw that message, which has a huge impact on the awareness that the world have about Bitcoin because most of these accounts never tweeted anything about Bitcoin. So this is going to be potentially incredibly impactful.

So it looks like we've got a couple guests joining us now. We've got Steve, who is the head of our social media team, and maybe Charlie Shrem will be joining us later. So that'll be interesting. But for now, Steve, how's it going? You got a nice natural scenery going on behind you?

Yeah, well, I picked a crazy time to take a couple days off, I'll put it to you that way. But yeah, we've been working really hard on the back end and I actually just got a security alert from my email, so I might have to go. But I've been working really hard to make sure that our Twitter account is secure and we're not being hacked.

So what were the measures that you implemented to prevent that to happen?

Well, I initially disconnected all third party applications from our platform and then I verified our two FA authentication. So that way we know exactly who's getting in there. And so I'm just monitoring the situation while also trying to cover it for everybody and trying to protect your, our precious Coin Telegraph from the hackers.

Yeah, in one way, at first I felt a little bit insulted by the fact that these hackers ignored us in a way, you know, but this is, of course, just a joke, but. We have half a million followers, so of course our account is also pretty valuable. And thanks for keeping it safe.

Thank you. We're always trying to stop spam on cointelegraph's platform, and it's a constant battle. And I know people on Facebook and other social platforms like to engage with us on there and help us a lot in getting the spam off of our pages. And it's a community effort. We're really grateful for everybody in our audience who is looking out for cointelegraph.

Wait, so could you explain a little bit more why you disconnected all third parties from our Twitter account? I thought that was a really interesting measure to take. Why? Why should people be disconnecting their third party application or their third party from Twitter?

I mean, that's going to be your best practice in social media. Just a little industry tip, but, you know, you got to look at it like this. There's only so many ways that you can hack the Twitter API, and a third party seems to be one of the easier ways to do it. And so, just as a preventative measure, we went ahead and disconnected it all. Of course, now we have to put it back together.

How long do you think that's going to take to put it all back together?

No, it won't take too long. It'll be all right. We got it covered.

So we got Tone Vase commenting on the issue. He says this Twitter hack is pretty crazy, but as long as your bitcoin keys are secure and you should sleep sound tonight, those are the only passwords that actually matter. All other digital accounts can be restored or replaced. So, of course, a maximalist position on the situation. Bitcoin maximalist position. Yeah. If you have your keys and you didn't send the bitcoin anywhere, you're fine.

I love it. It's wild. Who would have thought that. That we would see Twitter get hacked? I've never experienced anything on this scale.

Yeah, I mean, if tomorrow everyone stops using Twitter, then you might have to get used to use another platform for sending us our posts.

God forbid we have to turn to TikTok after this.

We already have a TikTok Jackson, and you're on there.

It hurts my soul every time I hear that. But it's actually interesting the fact that we are now these scams on Twitter because I've noticed that there actually have been a number of scams happening on YouTube as well. And YouTube is actually. Their ad algorithm has been promoting these crypto giveaway scams where they have a famous person there and they're like, give us this amount of crypto and we'll give you even more back. Like, it was especially prevalent during the halving. But it seems that these scams have actually continued past that and now they're even showing up on the ad algorithms of YouTube. So, I mean.

Oh, of course. I mean, it's. You know, it reminds me of 2017. I feel like. I feel like this is like July 2017. I mean, what. Like the amount of scamming that's going on is. Is at a fever pitch right now. And, you know, I'm constantly, you know, getting rid of bots that are trying to scam our audience and fighting the battle against them, but this is obviously a much more coordinated attack and it's very impressive. You got to give them credit, you know, But I know that. I know that Coin Telegraph reporters and editors are working with right now to figure out who. Who did it. And we have. We have some leads already. So the story is breaking and we will. We are going to crack the code.

I know.

Hopefully we can. We can get that info live as well. That would be great. To break it to you guys. Yeah, I'd be super excited to have that info in here.

We seem to not receive any more news about other accounts being hacked. Maybe they stopped the hacking. There are not any more news about.

You know, for those of you who don't know, Twitter has locked out all verified accounts from posting, so it seems that it's working.

This measure is bringing some results.

Actually, I just had a friend message me saying that blue checks are back.

The blue checks are back right now, the last time I checked. And yeah, it's definitely something. But if you notice, when they first started the attack, they went for crypto accounts first. They went for the exchanges first.

They started there.

Yeah, they started there. And then it's just spread to all these other accounts. Is. Is it bullish? I don't know. You tell me. I mean, this is an unprecedented moment.

I can tell you one thing is that bitcoin is rising on Google Trends right now. The term is rising on Google Trends.

Oh, it's trending on Twitter right now as well.

Trending on Twitter as well. So it depends on how you define bullish. I think if you think awareness is bullish, then this is definitely bullish. But this does give a little bit of a negative light on bitcoin given the context in which bitcoin is being used. So it'll be interesting to see how the overall sentiment evolves after this big crisis, as you could call it.

Yeah, it's an awesome moment. You know, honestly, one of the other points that the editors have been making is just how unsuccessful this was. The person who did the hack did not get away with nearly as much bitcoin as maybe they thought they were going to.

That's surprising.

Yeah, that's surprising. But it also goes to show how well trained crypto Twitter is. We can see you can smell it a mile away, you know.

Yeah, some funky business.

That's why I was mentioning it. Probably this event is gonna have much more of an information slash reputational impact than a kind of financial one. I mean, if, of course, we have to see how is this gonna impact the stock price of Twitter and the price of bitcoin tomorrow. But so far, yeah, it seems that this is spreading awareness. Not sure what kind of awareness.

Yeah, I think, you know, as Johan de Grieg in the chat pointed out, you know, there's no such thing as bad publicity. Right. The age old adage. Yeah, all coverage is good coverage to some extent, I think.

Yeah. Because maybe this is not gonna have a very good effect on institutional involvement. Into cryptocurrency. Like institutional investors are well known to be skeptical about the space specifically because this scam related events that happen often. But maybe for retail people, for just common investors in bitcoin, this is going to be a spark for people to get awareness of even the existence of bitcoin.

Yeah, I would definitely agree. And you know, it's kind of how you view the pandemic in a way. Right. It's like you have a challenge to the system itself and thus you must innovate. And this is another challenge to a lot of systems, especially like the integrity of a platform like Twitter. And also, you know, use the usage of bitcoin as a commodity versus a tradable asset versus a something you scam somebody with, you know, is a very, very important distinction that cryptocurrency has to come to terms with. And this is part of the process. And you know, we're all learning and experiencing this wild crypto ride together. It's decentralized. And that's the beauty of. Yeah, and I think the dedication to the cause is part of the reason that you have such momentous experiences like this where you have the presidential candidate of a major political party in the United States asking for bitcoin. I mean, can you believe that this is happening?

Yeah.

And maybe a lot of these people tomorrow are going to make some statements even like on mainstream media. So this is, is going to be even more publicity.

Absolutely, absolutely. And you know, we're in a really interesting period in time and it's really fun to be part of it.

But I was actually wondering like this was the, like this was the only way those scammers could get money out of a scam like this. Like there is no other asset that they could have asked for to get it in such a speedy and direct way. Like bitcoin was the only asset that could be used as a mean to perform this scam. I cannot think about any other assets like they couldn't have written.

I mean, but it's interesting that they would choose bitcoin. You know, obviously you said it wasn't, as you mentioned before, it wasn't super successful. You know, they didn't get for the level, the profile of profiles that they hacked. You know, they didn't get an extraordinary amount of returns. I think they got around over $100,000 and worth of bitcoin. But it's interesting that they chose to use bitcoin. You know, because bitcoin is traceable, you will be able to see where that money goes they didn't shoot Monero or zcash or something, which is totally anonymous. They decided to use bitcoin. And I think our guest earlier chalked it up to stupidity. But, you know, it's interesting to bring about. And I think someone in our chat mentioned on the other side of things, that if the hackers cared about bitcoin, they would not scam people. They would say, buy bitcoin. It's just interesting to think that the hackers had the power to hack all of these accounts. And what did they do with that power? Of all the things that they could do with the access to those kind of platforms. I didn't try to scam people with bitcoin. It's kind of absurd, don't you think?

It's amazing. Yeah, it's a work of art. Yeah, it's a masterpiece. I mean, because even the language that was used is still traditional Internet spam language, which is just so funny and just like, you know, it's so transparent.

Like, enjoy.

It's like, Give, give us AirDrop 50 BTC gift for you to this account and we will double. You know, it's like they didn't try to even word it, you know, presidentially or, you know, they just went with. They went with like the most funded out, like, language you could put, you.

Know, by the way, we have an updated list of the Twitter account that got hacked. So we get. They were Barack Obama, Binance, Gemini, cz, Kucoin, Coinbase, Bitfinex, Justin Sun, Charlie Lee, Apple, Mike Bloomberg, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Uber, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden with Khalifa, Barack Obama again, and Kim Kardashian and Kanye west again.

Well, I'll tell you what, I'll tell you one account that didn't get hacked. Coin Telegraph, baby. So that's right. So I know, you know, there's some kind of hope in the world.

Yeah, it's funny how it started, you know, like CZ Finance, Justin Sun. And then all of a sudden, it just goes straight to Apple, Bill Gates, Kanye West. You know, I feel like, right. The jump was absolutely massive, you know.

Yeah, Apple took the nuclear option and just deleted, I think, all of their tweets. They might be back up now.

They deleted all of their tweets.

Well, their response initially, you know, I haven't checked because I'm. I'm here with you lovely gentlemen. But initially their response was to wipe out all of all of their tweets instead of just deleting the one that was. That was spam. Quite funny. I'M not sure. Yeah, I mean, it's going to be really fun to figure out who did this and I know that we're going to do it. I have total confidence in our editorial staff and investigative journalists who actually, in the while it was all happening, had already sourced the, the address. And like you were saying with the bitcoin, it does leave things like marginally transparent parent instead of using like a privacy coin. So there is going to be, there's like a trail, there's some breadcrumbs that'll lead us to the, to the answer.

Yeah, looking forward to that. So.

Yes, sir.

Thanks a lot, Steve, for joining us in the call.

Yes, thanks for having me.

Have a nice walk in the park.

Yes. It's 110 degrees right now, so wish.

Me luck and keep a close eye on Twitter. I'm sure things are going to get even more interesting as the day progresses.

I'll try to drop some, some hilarious memes for everybody. I'm doing my best.

Oh, we love that.

All right.

Your memes are always on point.

Sometimes, sometimes they're. I try to make them as funny as I can, I promise. All right, you guys, thanks.

Take care.

Adios.

Ciao.

So we apparently gonna have Tone Vase on to comment on the situation very soon.

Yeah, we're gonna get him on next. So for those of you who are new to what's going on right now about, I think three to four hours ago, the first hack started. Justin Sun, CZ Binance, Bitfinex, Charlie Lee, Coindesk, even a number of the crypto outlets got hit. And then the hack spread onto even bigger figures in the Twitter space. Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Apple, Kanye, Elon Musk, Wendy's. God. All of these huge Twitter accounts got hit with a scam that was essentially asking people to send money to a bitcoin address and then promising that they would return double the amount if sent.

So so far, the address accumulated around 12.8 bitcoin, which is just over $100,000, like $105,000 more or less. So not a huge amount, but.

Yeah.

So Twitter reacted after a few hours, blocking most of the verified. Actually, all the verified accounts on Twitter to stop the, to stop the hackers, to continue posting these messages. So we're gonna. We have Ton Vase on. Hi, Ton.

What's up, Tone? All good.

Can you hear us? I think we can't hear you.

Yeah, your audio seems a little bit cut off. Coming through.

Tried to talk.

Huh?

Yeah, it seems like we're we're breaking up a little bit. Not sure what that's due to. Maybe it's the connection or something. Is it?

I hear you guys fine.

Ah, there we go. We can hear you all right now.

Awesome. All right, we're set.

I'm gonna pop out for a moment.

Sure, sure. So, Tony, are you guys live yet?

Are you guys live?

No.

Yeah, yeah, we are live. We have been live already for about 40 minutes maybe.

Oh, awesome. I need to tweet this out to people that follow myself. Is it on Coin Telegraph's Twitter?

Your Twitter is still working?

My Twitter is fine. I'm not a verified account.

By the way.

I'm not aware how this verified account actually work. At what point do your account becomes verified? Is there any.

Your account becomes verified when you are willing to send Twitter an unreasonable amount of personal information from your passport picture, your phone number, and your date of birth, and maybe your, I don't know, mother's maiden name, your bitcoin keys. Basically, there's like a giant list of unreasonable amount of personal information you have to send them, which I refuse to do because I like to protect that information. So I never plan to verify my Twitter account.

That's me.

Yeah.

So that doesn't depend on the amount of followers you have? Like, even.

No.

Okay, okay.

No. And the problem that Twitter ran into as a lot of people, like, had verified accounts that weren't really important. And a lot of people were verifying their accounts and then selling their verified accounts to scammers who would then change the display name and keep the blue check mark.

That happened right now?

No, that didn't happen now, but that has happened, which is why Twitter got into a big mess a while ago when they realized that. Wait a minute. This literally says, Elon Musk, verified account. How can this be? And that's because someone with the verified. Because they didn't lock down the account. Like, when you verify someone's account, you're not supposed to let them change their display name to be someone else, because that's how more people get scammed.

But I actually don't know if the sky is limited. Verified accounts, I have no idea.

But most important accounts are not that important. But most important accounts just happen to be verified. So I can definitely see this happening.

To a non verified account. I think we have a little problem with the sound.

Really?

But what was your first reaction to what happened?

Honestly, unless bitcoin is actually hacked somehow, which I don't believe that it will be, or unless my bitcoin keys are hacked. For me, it's like, what else do you expect? I expect everything to get hacked nowadays. Especially more so because.

Do you think. It depends. I think we have a problem with the sound. Is that on tone side?

I'm not entirely sure. It looks like there seems to be this. Some sort of recurring sound issue between us. Not. Not sure exactly what's going on. Tone. Let's see.

Let's see if we can fix the issue.

Maybe try again.

Try to speak now.

Yeah, I.

Okay.

I'm sorry, Tone. It doesn't look like the connection's working out for us. Yeah, I don't know why. Honestly, no idea why.

Let's see if I can try to log out and log back in again.

Yeah.

Come back to the stream, I think.

Let's keep in touch and maybe we can have you on again in a bit. Sure, yeah.

We'll try again another time. I mean, I've been doing videos all morning. I haven't had much issues, so I have no idea what's going on now.

All right.

Hey, thanks, guys. Hey, as long as your bitcoin is safe, everything else is replaceable. Only your Bitcoin. Protect your Bitcoin.

That's it. And the deck.

And don't send facts. All right, thank you, Tone. Appreciate it. Hopefully we'll talk to you in a bit. And now it looks like we're actually going to have on next our head of news, Dylan Love. Pretty excited to see what he has to say about this whole ordeal. And if there's been any progress on finding out who the hackers are, there's a lot of speculation floating around right now. Was this an inside job? Who had access to this ability to hack? It could have been done by someone outside. Or would it have taken inside knowledge to get this much access to all of these accounts?

And this is specifically one of the stories Cointelegraph can actually unbundle. Because as one of the top media in the industry, we are basically feeling a personal responsibility to find out what happened and to make clarity over the responsibles for these hacks. Because this is huge. This is probably one of the biggest hacks in the history of Twitter. Probably the biggest.

Yeah. So it looks like we've got Dylan on right now. Welcome, Dylan.

What's up, guys?

We are basically feeling a personal responsibility to find out.

Yeah, you don't want to mute the stream.

I was watching amazing YouTube, so I thought I would keep going while I participated in it.

Love it, Love it.

Anyway, nice job on the stream, guys. It's been going about 45 minutes. I have. I have stuff to talk about. Can we talk a little bit?

Where should we start?

We should start with the anonymous tip basically got off with a phone call with a tipster and editor and a writer for Cointelegraph. We have a strong lead on how this hack was. Was possible. But this is all still very fresh information, everything. And keep in mind, anonymous source, we. There's talk of. There's talk of them sending us some evidence. We haven't gone through the evidence yet, but these guys seem to know quite a bit of stuff. We're just waiting for basically some details from them to help confirm what they've already said, what they've said. Their words are that this was possible because of an inside situation. There is some Twitter employee on the inside who has some motivation or some contact on the outside who is basically handling these requests for him specifically. What is happening, the source says, is that this Twitter employee is changing the email addresses associated with Elon Musk's Twitter account, for example, Change it from elantesla.com away to hacker xyzmail, change the password there, and then log in with the new password to tweet whatever you want. In this case, they just happen to have a whole scam backed up around gaining access to these people who have these basically these giant billboards on the Internet. These people like Elon Musk, Barack Obama. If you can put a fraudulent crypto wallet address in front of that many eyeballs, it's gonna work. If it works on less than 1% of those people, it's still a good number. And unfortunately, it seems like that's what's happening here. So that's what we think we know about this hack, and we're working on confirming all of this as we speak. So. Wow, what a crazy day to be covering crypto news.

Yeah. If that is true, that Twitter employee might have been like a bitcoin enthusiast who wanted to spread the voice of bitcoin all around.

I'm skeptical of this. I think anybody who designs a scam like this wants money and nothing else. I don't think this is anything to do with elevating bitcoin within the mainstream. I mean, here we are talking about scams, right? What is this doing to serve the underlying mission of cryptocurrency? It's fraud. Right. This is a reality of fintech. Right. There's always going to be some degree of fraud. This just happens to be a very brazen example of it.

So we were discussing about this just before. What do you think is going to be the impact on the reputation of cryptocurrency and bitcoin? Probably not very good.

Yeah, I could see it. I could see this going well. This could be a great learning point for everybody, a great little time. We could say, oh, remember the time where all these high profile people tweeted some version of exactly the same thing telling them to send them money? I think this could be a huge learning thing. You know, if people haven't heard about crypto scams by now, first of all, they've probably been living under a rock for a few years, but this is obviously going to be the thing that we'll be talking about. You know, it's evening time here in the US But I expect that there will be more than a little bit of rehashing of today's events throughout the rest of this week and into next. Hopefully, with some good legwork on our part, we'll be able to name these people. The piece of information that we're trying to tease out from our source right now is the first name of the Twitter employee, which they say they know, but have not, have not offered this detail to us yet. We're still discussing all this stuff.

What are your feelings on the whole execution of this scam? I mean, it seems strange that someone would have access to all of these super high profile accounts and then use that access to pull off a bitcoin scam. I mean, they could have done so much more. And it seems like if their aim was strictly to make money, doing it through a bitcoin scam is not really the optimal way. You know, bitcoin is traceable.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now they, they've traded one problem for another, right? So now they have all this magic Internet money in a place where as soon as it moves, people are going to be watching it. So good luck spending your crypto is kind of my first thought.

Is there any way they can actually hide the tracks? Like kind of make their tracks be loosed through some.

I understand what you're saying. Yeah, definitely. They could find a mixing service they could anonymize. They could quickly anonymize the coins, sending them to some mixer where it comes out of the mixer being the same amount of coins, but they belong, they previously belong to somebody completely different. That's one way to do it. That's probably the best way.

So we just, we just heard that actually a senator sent a letter to Jack Dorsey asking what's going actually dangerous. And if it's any dangerous, if it's Dangerous for Donald Trump's account. It's a pretty interesting single minded responds to this whole scam.

Yeah.

Notably Donald Trump's account is not, not hacked.

That's.

Yeah, we, we spoke to the source about exactly this. Why, why are like why, why don't. Why not Donald Trump and why so many other people affected. And one of, one of our sources theories is that Donald Trump's account might have some certain limitations on it around who is seeing what. Obviously a certain number of people are going to have blocked him, blocked Donald Trump's account. But you could say the same thing about Obama, Bill Gates. So it's a good question why they didn't go for President Trump. I mean the hack as we've described it is really more of a human engineering thing. Everything is working exactly as it's supposed to. It's just there's a malicious person at the control. So yeah, I don't know guys, it's crazy stuff.

Do you think justice will be swift for this hacker? I mean it seems like we're already making investigation.

Yeah, I'd love to think that, I'd love to think that Cointelegraph can play a role in that even. But also, but also I'm setting quite a high bar there. I don't know. The answer is I don't know. You know we can exert. We as Cointelegraph can do some things.

Hold on. I'm so sorry but Twitter support was just hacked.

That's exciting.

Twitter support just has the message, you know, I'm giving back to my community. Due to COVID 19, Bitcoin sent to my address below will be sent back double. If you send $1,000, I will send back $2,000. And it has that, the patented bitcoin address here. So yeah, even Twitter has not.

What's the total that, what's the total we're at for people throwing money at this wallet?

So let's check.

Jojo. I think last time we checked it was like over 300 transactions which was totaling around over $110,000. But I think Giovanni can probably get you the exact number soon. But for all of the effort and for the number of people who have been exposed to this, it seems like kind of a low number to be honest. Only 317 transactions.

Well, you have to think about how many people first of all have Bitcoin and understand that it's a thing that they can send to addresses. And then the second thing is they have to be kind of silly enough to fall for this trick. So I Think that's a small population of people who both have crypto and not only use it, but know how to use it and then b are simultaneously susceptible to this kind of obvious scam. I don't know if you, what is the name of the, of the organization? So it's like something about health is in the word. I'm forgetting the name of it right now.

It was like Crypto Health or something.

Crypto for health dot com. If you go to that website, I.

Think that's the site it was.

Anyway, the total received by that address is 12.8 Bitcoin. A total of 358 transactions. Okay, that's surprisingly very small. I mean if you sum up the amount of followers that all those addresses have, it's hundreds of millions of followers. I mean this is a huge amount.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is, this is the bit, the billboards in the sky thing. I was talking about this. It's not about, it's about getting that money making address in front of as many people as possible. That's what this was. So that website I was just talking about was absolutely online this morning because I looked at it and noticed how kind of mediocre the grammar was. That website is now gone completely. So I think if I thought we were near the end of this a few hours ago, but it seems to still be going. I wonder how much longer this is actually going to go on. At some point these guys are going to see some diminishing returns.

Well, I mean, wasn't all the verified accounts locked? So as of I think like an hour ago, at least, maybe more, the all verified users of Twitter were locked out of using Twitter. And I assume as long as that's the case, these scams can't really get around much because people can't post them. But it seems like if what you're saying is true, and this may be an inside job, you then wouldn't the insider have access to that protocol and be able to, you know, work their way around these lockdown?

No, and I'll tell you why. It's because the person changing the emails and resetting the password for sake of somebody else. Resetting a password. So there's two people in this little equation. There's the Twitter employee inside, this external person, the malicious hacker Twitter person. All they're doing is changing email addresses. That's, that's the beginning and end. Okay, who, who, whose are they? Whose are they changing? Well, that information comes from the outside guy, right? So, so we are super curious about that relationship Is this. Is there money involved? Are these guys just buddies? Are they in it together? Does this internal employee. Is this internal employee somehow being taken advantage of? A million things are possible and this situation is still just too new. We're still doing our diligence on it, but here I am speculating about it in public.

What do you think is going to be the impact on the reputation of Twitter after this? I mean, a major thing for Twitter itself.

Twitter's reputation isn't exactly sterling to begin with. This is not exactly the place you think of when you think of places to go and enjoy, like a productive conversation on the Internet. Right. Twitter has a little bit of a black mark when it comes to this stuff.

They don't exactly, but that's the main place for a crypto conversation going on. Like most of the conversation around crypto happens on Twitter.

I think there's a lot that happens in telegram groups. I think a lot happens on Reddit. Sure, people are snarkier and funnier on Twitter, but it's just one place, it's just one medium and it's not even the best one, I don't think. But wherever people are talking, people are also talking about crypto. I don't care too much about the destiny, about where something appears. I care about who's saying it, what they're saying.

I mean, do you think that this might drive people to other platforms? Like, you mentioned Telegram and Reddit before.

I feel like Twitter is too ingrained. Telegram is a little more of a Swiss army knife of communication. It can serve a whole bunch of different purposes, whether professional, social or whatever else. But Twitter to me just feels very shallow. Right. When the most you can write. What is the character limit now? They upped it from 140. I still remember 140. But when the most you can write is low hundreds of characters, I don't think you're exactly inviting a deep and moving conversation. We actually, we don't need to continue criticizing Twitter. They have their own problems today.

That is an astute observation. We actually have another fun little tidbit of information here. It looks like that according to Wikipedia, an always reliable source, that the first full version of Twitter was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006, which coincidentally is.

14Th anniversary of today. Wow.

Wow.

Yeah. So this, I don't know, man.

I don't know.

A bit more coincidental and calculated than first meets the eye. I mean, not trying to set up any conspiracy theories here, but who knows?

Well, it's all a conspiracy theory for now. Until we know exactly what's going on. All we have is conspiracy theory.

By the way, it's a good thing that our Twitter account didn't get hacked differently.

I feel like this has come up before.

No, we haven't mentioned it at all.

We just refresh for our audience the information.

Yeah. And for those of you who just joined, I see we've got some newcomers in the chat. You know, we've had this ongoing Twitter scam that started, I think, around three and a half to four hours ago, where first crypto people were getting hacked, and then it spread to. It spread to more prolific Twitter accounts, including former President Obama, current presidential candidate Joe Biden, Kanye west, former presidential candidate Kanye west, excuse me, Kim Kardashian, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Apple, et cetera.

Jeff Bezos.

Yeah, Jeff Bezos as well. Exactly. And it's. You know, these scams have involved asking people for crypto and promising that they'll send back double the amount of the address that was posted on many of these people's accounts has so far garnered around 12.8 bitcoin, has accrued so far around 12.8 bitcoin, which is equivalent to around $110,000. More than $110,000. Twitter has locked out all verified accounts as a precautionary measure to avoid further scam posts.

And by the way, now we have Twitter support. Tweet that just came out. It says we are continuing to limit the ability to tweet, reset your password, and some other account functionalities while we look into this. Thanks for your patience. So apparently they are struggling to figure out what happened because it's been already, like, a few hours and still on their side. There is no clear solution or explanation of what happened.

I think it's because everything is working exactly as it's supposed to and there's just a bad apple on the inside. That's what I think. That is my unconfirmed theory for now.

And that's coming from our head of news at Cointelegraph. For those of you who don't know, this is Dylan Love, the head of news at Cointelegraph, and he is currently investigating with his team what's going on with Twitter, who the hacker might be. And he believes that this might be possibly an inside job in liaison with someone working outside with malicious intent. Notably, Donald Trump has not had his account hacked amongst all the others. So it'll be. You know, personally, I'm very, very curious as to why this person decided to do this thing and to why it was executed. Executed as it was, it seems like, you know, through all the effort to gain access to all these accounts, it was not the most optimal way to get lots of money. I don't know, it just seemed very strange, honestly.

I mean, what other scheme would you use to get money out of Twitter?

I'm not a scammer, dude. This is my area of expertise.

I mean, to me, using Twitter to get money, this is the only way or the easiest way to get money through. Through hacking Twitter. What else can you use apart from bitcoin or crypto in general? Like, there's no other asset that can be sent so easily using just a code written down on a social media like Twitter like this. So, yeah, it has to be seen, like tomorrow. How many people are going to blame bitcoin? How many people are going to blame Twitter? I see already these kind of two factions forming on in the discourse on Twitter itself right now.

Well, Dylan, do you have any other parting wisdoms of information you would like to give to us before we find.

And turn in scammers?

And apparently it's. It's not that difficult to do. So all you have to do is go on Twitter.

Anyway, thank you, guys.

Yeah, thanks for that update.

Thank you, Dylan.

Yeah, hopefully we can get some more information on what's going on in the investigation soon.

And it's just begun. This has just begun. Really? We'll be talking about this all week at least.

Yeah. Keep refreshing that cointelegraph page. You know, maybe an article will pop up there that will give you some insight onto what's going on. So thanks again, Dylan. Really appreciate it.

Thank you, guys. Bye bye.

See you.

Take care.

All right, so just to.

Let's go over once again everything that's happened so far.

I felt that you have been repeating it quite a while, so I will relieve you from refreshing information. So we are facing the biggest scam in Twitter history. A few hours ago, a lot of celebrities account were hacked, starting from some crypto celebrities like Justin Tron, they got hacked on Twitter. And after crypto celebrities, also people that were not related to crypto were also hacked on Twitter. And the hackers just wrote a request of sending bitcoin to a specific address. And basically those people managed to hack very famous people's account, including Mike Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Obama, but also Warren Buffett, Joe Biden, and many more. And all of these accounts started posting requests of sending a certain amount of bitcoin to a certain address and with a promise to receive double that amount. And apparently already a Certain amount of people fell into the trap. There were over 12, almost 13 bitcoin, 12.8 bitcoin were sent to that specific address for a total of something around $110,000. And yeah, so the incident is still not clear like who did that, why it did that. But the Twitter support team is still investigating what happened. Also.

Cointelegraph.

Exactly. Also our editorial team is researching the event and trying to find out who was the hacker. And by the way, Justin sun from Tron just announced a few hours ago when the hack happened, announced a bounty of $1 million to anyone who managed to track the hackers. So hopefully that is gonna stir some independent investigators who are going to do some good job in finding out what hood hackers are.

Yeah, I'd be curious to see what you guys think about all this in the chat. You know, let me know. Like, so far our team has come up with the hypothesis that this could be an inside job, that someone inside of Twitter was working with someone outside of Twitter to gain access to all of these different profiles and spread this scam message. So I'd be curious to see, you know, what do you guys think about that theory and one of the recurring conversations throughout this whole thing is what is going to be the impact on Bitcoin. You can see here in the bottom right hand corner of your screen that there is the bitcoin ticker there which shows the price and the price since this whole scam started, started at around $9,200. So obviously Bitcoin's price has not really moved at all since the beginning cycle of this news. So it'll be curious to see how the price evolves as this goes on. And it'll be even more curious to see how Twitter's, the stock price of Twitter reacts to all of the circumstances. As you know, New York, the US Stock market is currently closed for the night and we'll be reopening tomorrow morning. And then we'll be able to see the first effects of all of this news on Twitter stock.

Yeah, and the most crazy thing that to me, this incident under lights is like the amount of awareness that this hack is going to bring about Bitcoin. So most of these people that were hacked had millions of followers, so those followers didn't hear about like many of those followers didn't hear about Bitcoin since today. And because of this hacker, they found out about the existence of Bitcoin. So this is potentially going to have a huge impact on the awareness of Bitcoin, of people towards Bitcoin. So we'll see tomorrow what kind of impact it's going to have on the price. And we are already aware, we are already witnessing a surge in Google's Google.

Trend searches for bitcoin. And bitcoin's also trending on Twitter as well.

Yeah.

So it's raising awareness for bitcoin for sure. And one of the biggest intrigues for me in this whole thing is why did the person do this? I see that we have some comments about it in chat saying that very smart people did this, not bedroom pirates. And I think it's interesting with this kind of access to these high profile profiles, what would you do? What would you do with that kind of power? What kind of message would you spread? There's so much chaos that could have been created from a widespread hack like this.

By the way, we have an interesting joke by Jay Chervinsky who says, breaking after Twitter hack bitcoin volatility skyrockets as price crashes in free fall from 9,225 to $9,220. So, yeah, I guess this refers to the scarce amount of volatility that we have been seeing lately in the bitcoin market, where even like fall of $5 can mean much.

Yeah, huge price reaction coming in from bitcoin right now. Yeah. So it's a really interesting time. It'll see. It'll be, you know, this is an event that's very similar to what happened in 2017. I mean, similar in publicity, not similar in actual events. And it'll be interesting to see if there is some sort of surge in involvement in crypto. If we see more retail investors coming in, it'll be interesting to see what the institutional reaction will be to this whole thing. I think a lot of institutions have always been peddling this narrative of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies being a scammy asset being used for nefarious purposes. And this event plays directly into those kinds of narratives that these old institutions have been peddling. And so will we see some sort of negative reaction from institutions? Recently Fidelity Investments got involved in bitcoin, I'm pretty sure. And we've seen a gradual increase of institution involvement in bitcoin coin since CME futures were introduced back in 2017. So it'll be really curious to see. It'd be funny to see a negative reaction from institutions, but a positive reaction from retail. Just kind of like that kind of flip.

But I think that's highly possible because at the end of the day, institutional investors and retail Investors are moved in different ways. They move in different ways. Sometimes like retail investors are always attracted by speculation, high volatility, the possibility of making quick money, while the retail investor a little bit more calculating the moves. By the way, we got an update by Bitfinex. Bitfinex released a statement.

They were one of the accounts that was hacked on Twitter. By the way, Bitfinex, they just released a statement.

It says, we abhor this attack on the bitcoin ecosystem and on free speech more generally. Bitfenix and Tether will do all they can to ensure that people are not robbed by fraudsters or otherwise compromised. As we always do, we will cooperate with valid law enforcement appeals to stop the damage and with any lawful requests in the inevitable investigation to follow. Let's see how this investigation evolves. Cointelegraph is doing its best to track the source of the hack. And we already have some leads from anonymous sources kind of hinting at the possibility that this is an inside job in Twitter.

Yeah, just to give some context to that response, Twitter has had some very interesting run ins with free speech in the past. They recently been began editorializing tweets that fell that were against their guidelines, glorifying violence, spreading false information and stuff like that. And President Donald Trump even had one of his tweets censored by Twitter. So Twitter has had an ongoing rocky relationship with free speech on this platform and has brought up the debate on what constitutes a private space for free speech and what constitutes a public, public space for free speech. And we're seeing again this issue brought up in this crisis because Twitter was actively limiting the use of verified accounts on their platform. So essentially what happened was after these scams have been going around for a couple hours, they locked down all of the verified, all. Let me say this again, not just the accounts that were affected by the scam, but every single verified account on Twitter was locked down, which meant that they could not post, they could not do anything, they could not retweet, they couldn't do anything at all that related to their account.

And so which actually was not taken very positive by a lot of people that started actually complaining that Twitter was abusing its role. And a lot of people are even saying that this is all a centralized. This is all showing how flawed Twitter is because of its highly centralized way of working, and that possibly this is going to move a lot of people away from Twitter to more decentralized platforms. There is a lot of actual speculation about how this event can actually impact Twitter and move people to maybe more Centralized solutions.

And this isn't the first crypto scan that we've seen recently. If you were involved in the crypto community during the most recent bitcoin halving, you may have noticed that on Twitter, there were a lot of crypto scams circulating around the YouTube space. They were often showing a prominent figure in tech or in crypto and offering to send back a certain amount of crypto in exchange for sending them a certain amount of crypto. And now these YouTube scams continue to exist. They're even showing up in sponsored ads through YouTube's algorithm. So these scams continue, and it seems that this Twitter scam is just another leap in this kind of scam cycle. So, actually, it seems that we can.

Have Scott Melker on our show. Apparently his account was hacked as well. Maybe you can give us some perspectives from the side of the victim.

Yeah, we're gonna get him on here in just a second. Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of Allstreet. He is trader in the crypto community and also a dj, I believe. So his account was hacked, and he was on Twitter saying that he was actually able to regain access to his. His account and telling people not to trust anything that he posts. So it would be awesome to get him on and have him tell us a little bit about what his experience was involving this scam and Twitter, essentially limiting his ability to have a voice on the platform.

By the way, for the moment, an update on the bitcoin actually stolen. The total bitcoin that was sent to this scam address is 12.8 Bitcoin, which is equivalent to around $117,000. So that's not a huge amount of money. But again, we want to underline the fact that this is going to have a huge impact on the awareness people have on crypto, on Twitter's reputation. It is going to have several side effects besides the actual money stolen.

And it's interesting because you look at $117,000 sent through, I think it was over 300 transactions. And you might think that's a small number, given the fact that some of the most prominent people in Twitter were hacked. Obama, Bill Gates, Apple, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk. Some of the most followers in the Twitter space were hacked, and such a small number of people sent their money there. And that is probably because the crypto space is a small community. And within that small community, there are not many people who would actually fall for a scam like that. We've seen these scams before. We know what they look, like we've seen the language, we've seen. We understand that you don't just want to blindly send your bitcoin off to some random address. We get it. And so while that number may look small compared to the number of people who were exposed to the scam, there's a reason why that number is so small.

And actually, there is already a bunch of people who are underlying the positive effect that this is going to have on bitcoin. Because, for example, Gabor Gurbaks is writing all that power, and all they want is bitcoin. So it's, again, another way to underline the fact that these people held a huge amount of power by they could write anything they want and reaching so many people. And what they wrote was that they wanted bitcoin. So this is pretty significant, definitely. And, yeah, also another Twitter user writes, ask yourself, why did they ask for bitcoin? Somebody who hacked the most important social platform in the world only wants bitcoin. So, yeah, that's.

And it looks like we now have Scott Melker on the line. Welcome, Scott. What's up, guys? How are you doing? How are you feeling with all of this?

I feel great. I don't have to worry about Twitter for once in my whole life.

You're free.

No, it's pretty crazy, but I think this is more of a Twitter issue than a bitcoin issue, obviously. And even saw, I think, that cash app, they had them tweeting out, Send $1,000, get $2,000. So it wasn't even exclusively bitcoin from what I saw. They were actually, in some manner, trying to get dollars as well, although I don't know if those were retweets. Whatever. I don't really have much access to my Twitter at the moment. I can read it, I can retweet things, but I can't tweet, strangely.

So can you tell us briefly what happened to your account? How did you find out? What was your reaction?

I wasn't really hacked. So what happened to me was basically as a precaution, I went to change my password, and then it seemed like someone else was trying to change my password. I got an alert, so I don't know if it was random or the same timing or something. So we immediately changed my password. I have a buddy named Haseeb Awan who runs a company called Afani. He's also the guy who invented the bitcoin atm, but he's like, you know, he like, runs the phones for the Canadian government and stuff for security. So Anytime I have a security issue, I immediately call him. And so I don't, you know, we. We quickly changed my password. But then when I went to go back in with my new password, all of a sudden my two factor authorization didn't work. So, like, and I use it on a separate device offline. It's attached to the clock of that phone. So there's no reason that like, all of a sudden Twitter wouldn't accept my 2fa. So I don't know if somebody tried to switch the 2fa to their own account or something like that. But eventually, I don't know what black wizardry he did or what he did. We messed with things until suddenly my 2fa worked again about 30 minutes later. And I was like able to get back in my account. And then for like the next hour or so, I had full access of my account. And then I went to send a tweet and it did one of those things where it's like, we couldn't send your tweet right now, you know, check your drafts or whatever. And I haven't been able to tweet since, so. And allegedly they've just blocked off all, you know, verified accounts, which I think is brilliant. I mean, they need to, like, stop this, you know, and that's pretty much it. So I don't know, I think, you know, maybe somebody was trying to capitalize and something different happened to me. I don't really know. It's not. I mean, someone tries to hack me like once a week, so it's not an uncommon phenomenon. But I think this is a Twitter problem. Twitter wide. I don't think it has to do with those accounts, phone numbers or those accounts. 2fa. You know, I think that this is coming from the other side because it's not like these crypto accounts don't know how to secure their Twitter, you know.

Like, yeah, actually, I have to mention one personal story. My. My account was also hacked once and it was transformed into a fake Elon Musk account.

And that's like. But that. Right, and that's a huge thing, apparently. Like, I saw another one recently where they were like buying blue check accounts, like dead blue check accounts, and then changing the name of the account to a famous person and trying to get money that way. So like an account of like a dead celebrity or something that had a blue check still, they like, hacked that account, change the name to Elon Musk, and asked for money. It's crazy, man.

Yeah, it's funny because your story actually lines up with what our team is investigating right now. We have our news team investigating how this hack happened. And one of their sources said that there is an insider who was working with someone outside the organization. And that insider had access to all the emails and passwords of various accounts. And so they were going around changing the passwords of these verified accounts and thereby getting access to them. That speaks directly to the problem that you were having where you got a password alert and regaining access to your account through your password.

And that's like the classic, I mean, that's basically like the classic sim swap strategy. The way that they do anything when they kind of like brute force attack, get access to one thing and then try to, you know, switch everything as fast as humanly possible. So, yeah, that's interesting to hear because I hadn't really seen. It's interesting, you know, all these huge accounts have been. Are hacked or they're tweeting from them, but nobody knows, like, has heard anything else from any of them.

Right.

There's no, like, I haven't seen like a follow up tweet by any of these accounts, have you? I mean, I might not be paying enough attention, but it seems like that tweet is the last tweet on every one of these, like blue check accounts, right?

Yeah.

So, like, none of them have even been like, hey, someone got my password, or hey, some, you know, I don't know what's going on. There's been none of that. So I wonder if, like, as far.

As I know, they can't, they can't tweet because Twitter's locked them out of their from. From.

Right? But there was, I mean, there was at least, I don't know, for the ones who actually like tweeted out the scam. But like, there was a window of a good hour there in between, like until maybe an hour ago where I could tweet normally once I got back in. So then maybe it just took Twitter a long time to react, but it's a big problem for Twitter, man. Like, it's not good. Like they're gonna, I have to imagine they're gonna get sued into oblivion after this. I mean, they literally, I mean, they now have every influential human being and company on the planet angry at them at once.

It's interesting to know what kind of impact this is going to have on Bitcoin because of the huge awareness that this hack has spread all over the world.

I mean, I think it's bad. I don't think it's bad for price necessarily. I don't see that all of a sudden bitcoin is going to react. People start selling. I mean, I guess there's like the old Howard Stern adage, which is, you know, like the. Any press is good press. So even if it's shocking, it's good because, you know, it's trending and people are aware of it. But, like, in my opinion, the people who we want to take it seriously will just now put it back on the shelf, say, you know, hey, bitcoin is for criminals and nefarious actors, and it has no other purpose except for scamming. And like, I mean, certainly, you know, Joe Biden got hacked, man. Like, this is certainly not, like, the government's not going to look favorably on this. And, you know, even though they should realize that this is a Twitter issue. And to be honest, I mean, the fact that it's bitcoin just proves the point that, hey, man, we can all use bitcoin and send money without having to worry about a centralized authority and all the things. It just, you know, it's part of the. Part of the territory. But it's not great. I don't think it's.

Yeah. And I'd be curious, going, going back to something you said a while back, your reaction to Twitter's response to this whole ordeal, you know, locking people out of accounts. You, you. You took the position that that was a positive reaction.

I think they should have shut Twitter down completely.

Just delete it.

Well, I don't know how much money was stolen, but I mean, you're. This is like, it seems maybe it's not that much, a few hundred grand or something, which, by the way, makes this the worst hack in the history of weak ass hack attempts that I've ever seen.

They could have literally started a world war.

And they're. And they're trying like an old scam, you know, that's like, probably failed every time it's ever been tried in history. Send me a dollar, I'll send you $2.

Cool.

You know, like, they actually probably would have been better off doing A dollar for $2. Probably would have actually gotten more people than trying for 1,000.

Yes. That reminds me of what Geber Gurbac just tweeted. He said all that power and all they want is bitcoin. So, yeah, it's just to underline how much power they were holding in their hands with the control.

I mean, I agree. All they wanted was bitcoin, but that's kind of a meme, right? They wanted bitcoin because it's the easiest thing to get without it being traced. And they could have asked for Monero but not enough people would have had it off and to send it privately, you know, so they went for bitcoin because it was the best chance to legitimately get money sent into their account quickly and, you know, less traceable. But it seems super, like the hack itself seems like the most mind blowing, incredible sophisticated thing to be able to do that and get to those level accounts. And it's still happening, right? I don't know now, I haven't been looking, but it was happening for hours. Right. Elon Musk must have tweeted it like 10 times. And the best they could come up with. It's like kids came up with the actual scam after like a nation did the hacking or something. It's very weird.

Like, wouldn't you.

There's gotta be so many better and more effective things they could have done with that power for that amount of time.

Yeah. And for those who aren't aware about I think 117 or $118,000 worth worth of Bitcoin, 12.8 Bitcoin about was scammed. So not even that great returns, not.

Even in 10 bitcoin for a lifetime in prison. So I don't know if they had catch whoever did this. I wonder if it's more of a, like, I don't know, like a nation. It seems crazy that a person pulled this off, but just some more like sowing a little discontent and controversy and just, you know, who knows.

Do you really think that Twitter is going to go down over this?

No, but I think that it's going to be a bad time for Twitter. I mean, Twitter will obviously survive it. Things get hacked. But I'm just saying they've just like a lot of probably their biggest fans and proponents and people who have used it and been positive about Twitter probably just turned pretty negative in the short term, you know what I mean?

And how do you feel about Twitter's relationship to free speech? You know, they've had a number of run ins with it in the past. They've been editorializing tweets. They even censored one of Donald Trump's tweets for glorifying violence. They've had a lot of these conflicts and the argument for it is that this is like a private media platform, so they're allowed to do what they want on this space. But on the other hand, this is a huge platform with so many people on it, so many people have a voice on it for crypto. This is A huge platform. It's like the number one source of information for crypto.

Absolutely.

Whatever. How do you think this plays into Twitter's relationship to free speech?

That's a good question and not one that I can pretend to have a great answer for. They are a private platform. You can debate whether that's what they should allow or whether they should act on the fact that they have that power. But it is a private platform. And, you know, I think I'm kind of torn, you know, because a, like, where are you going to go if you have a problem with Twitter? To Facebook? It's worse. Right. But you know, telegram is. You have to gather your private group. It's not the same. Obviously. It's not really a social media platform. It's a messenger platform. And, you know, some really dangerous people do, I think, very dangerous things on social media. So, I mean, you can take the approach that the platforms have a responsibility to protect their users, or you can take the full, you know, yolo. You know, it's not hands free. Like, it's not our fault and whatever happens on there happens. But knowing that like, you know, elections are being decided by false information perpetuated on social media, you have to kind of at least some degree understand that they might want to, you know, try to mitigate that when they are. So I don't really fault them for necessarily, like, certainly, I mean, whether you like it or not, they have a terms of service. And when Trump, you know, that tweet was censored, he violated the terms of service, whether they choose to act on that or on him or on someone else. But when you sign up for one of these platforms, you know, I don't know, there was, there was a South park many years ago where like, it was, I think it was like the itunes user agreement and they did that. It was like a human centipede knockoff. And it was like. And the guy kept saying like every time someone would just hit the thing without reading it and they would get tortured and he's like, why won't they read? But nobody reads the terms to any of these things, you know, ever. Like, have you ever read the 30 page terms to any of these things you sign up for? I mean, the fact is, when you sign up, you are signing on to certain terms. You may not be aware of it because you don't feel like taking five hours of your life to dig through legal speak. But if you're violating terms that you signed, how can you fault the platform for that?

Yeah, there are literally apps that help you read terms?

I'm sure there should be because I've never read one.

By the way, I want to ask you regarding trading. So do you expect something like that to impact bitcoin price? I know that you don't really, you just look at the charts. You don't really follow this kind of news events as a motivation to change, to take some specific decision. How do you think you're going to react?

I mean, I think it would have happened in the last three or four hours. Right. I mean, we've gotten so much volatility the last four, five days when Bitcoin's traded within like a $200 range. I mean, it's almost unheard of levels of sideways. And if markets react to things generally it should be, I mean, there could be like a slow effect, but something this big, you would have thought it would have been a super knee jerk reaction. Like a real somebody with a lot of bitcoin hits the panic button and sells. And I don't think we saw that. I mean, maybe there'll be some residual effects to it. I haven't checked, but I would bet a lot of money that Twitter stock is down after hours. I haven't looked, but.

You got to.

Imagine that they're going to pay for it. So if Twitter stock is dropping, which yet again, I can't say it is or isn't, I would just bet it is. I would imagine that bitcoin would have gone with it if it was going to be feeling the effects of the same event.

What is your first tweet going to be when you get back online?

Well, I'm back. I was about to say something more profane and decided to keep it proper for the kids, but I don't know, hopefully it'll be soon. Actually, I think it should be a nice free for all, for everyone on the platform while all the blue check people are blocked out. My wife showed me some meme. It was like the guy from what movie was that? Somali pirates with the big eyes.

Like what was it, Captain, Captain Phillips or something?

Yes, yeah, exactly. And you know where the Somali pirates. And it was like, we're in control now, all of Twitter to the blue Czech people. But yeah, I mean, you know, I'll probably just go about my, my business and doing what I do and not make too big a deal about it. But it's pretty crazy that this is happening. For sure. I would, I mean, you know, I would have never imagined that we would see this kind of hack. Like, I don't Even know what the mechanics of doing something like that are or how it happens. But, I mean.

I mean, there's nothing like this that's happened in history, but our team is investigating it. And what they think. What they think so far is what happened was that there was someone outside the organization with malicious intent who had a liaison with someone inside the organization who had access to the emails and the password of a lot of these profiles. And so they were able to get access through that inside connection there.

I mean, that's like the classic hacker path. That's how SIM swaps happen. Like all of these data dumps, like when Equifax was hacked, or when any of these platforms are hacked and your personal information gets out there, it goes onto the dark web, and then people sell your Social Security and phone number, which unfortunately everyone has access to, and then that's how they basically gain brute force access to your account. Or there's just like a guy at Verizon who's willing to, like, who's making $11 an hour standing behind the counter or doing customer service, who has access to that data, and they pay him 10 grand and say, send us 1,000 phone numbers and Social Security accounts. And that's generally how it happens. Apparently, speaking with my friend Haseeb, who, like I said, what he does is basically protect people from SIM swaps. And that's what he says basically happens. There's a guy on the inside, they pay him, and it's a big data dump. And then they see the hackers reverse engineer basically the information they get to see who they can get enough information on to pretend to be you and swap the sim or that. Or they have an employee at the phone company who will just do the SIM swap, Right?

Yeah.

So, yeah, it's pretty crazy. I mean, I've been down that road. I've been hacked. It's terrible, you know?

Yeah. By the way, we got a total of 12.8 BTC sent to this hack address, which. Which is around $110,000 or something like that.

They could have made that on 100x long in like 10 minutes. Right. That's just not worth it. Right. I mean, I would have thought that this would have gotten millions of dollars, but I guess actually it kind of shows you how few people have bitcoin and have $1,000 worth of it that they would just send. I mean, that's why I'm saying this is like the weakest hack attempt ever. If they'd asked people for $100 and said, we'll send you 1,000. I bet they would have gotten a whole lot more, asking for a whole lot less. How many people have $1,000 in Bitcoin that they have access to immediately and are willing to send somewhere? Very, very few. It's not like everyone in the world has bitcoin.

Yeah. It's surprising. By the way, to our audience, we love your comments and if you have any questions regarding the hack or what happened, just write it down in the chat. We're gonna also share your thoughts with Scott, who also experienced, I mean, who was also involved in the first person in what was happening on his Twitter account. And by the way, yeah, don't forget to like and subscribe to our channel if you enjoy the stream, which I'm sure you are doing. So, yeah, just for those who don't know, this was the biggest scam in the history of Twitter. Just a few hours ago, major personality were hacked in their Twitter account and the hackers wrote a message where they asked for a certain amount of bitcoin to be sent to a specific address and with the promise of doubling that amount and giving back in double, basically. And among the people who got hacked were Barack Obama, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg, Bill Gates. So a lot of people with millions of followers. So this is going to have a huge impact on the awareness that people have around bitcoin. It's not still clear in what light if it's going to be positive or negative. It's going to be controversial for sure.

Yeah. We've got a few questions for you, Scott, from the audience. I think Jay's wondering how this will affect bitcoin short term and claret Ibiuchi. I'm not pronouncing that right, but can't.

Be expected to claret.

Yeah. He says, I think this will aid bitcoin's rise. What do you think?

Listen, I don't. I mean, I think that, like I said, I don't think it's going to affect price short term. And actually I think that's already proven right. Short term for bitcoin is like in 10 minutes, not five hours. So hopefully we've gotten past the worst of it as far as that. I don't think it's like I get the urge to spin it by the community because we're passionate about it and to spin it as a positive thing. It's so great. Now everybody knows about bitcoin. Yeah, everybody thinks that you're going to get scammed if you send it somewhere. I don't know that that's the, you know, what we're going for with the community. I think it's a.

It's a.

It's a speed bump. I don't think it, like, it's in no way a huge problem, but it's just another hurdle to overcome when you're trying to explain to someone why Bitcoin should be taken seriously and why it's important if they have it already in their mind that it's used for crime. And you know how people are now. Like, once they have a bias or an assumption on something, there's no, like, convincing them the other way or presenting any fact. That's how discourse is at this point. Politics, religion, whatever it is. You know, people read their one headline, they see the one Elon Musk tweet and the CNBC tweet, and they'll write it off for 10 years, you know, and say. And think they know everything about it. So, unfortunately, my gut says it's more of a negative than a positive.

Yeah. We've also had an interesting comment from Jessica Smith, who's wondering, do you think people need to start using DAPPS rather than Twitter? And I think. I don't know how much of a comparison there is there, but I think it's interesting to think about, what if there was a decentralized media platform similar, that operated similar to Twitter, and would there be any advantages in how that platform could react to a situation like this?

In theory, but you're not going to get a percentage of the world's population on that app. Right. And what makes Twitter so powerful and so impressive is that you can disseminate news, whether true or fake, very quickly and directly from the source. And I just don't see it getting that level of reach. It's like, we want to think that blockchain fixes everything, but really, I don't know that that's the case. I would love to see that in theory, but I think we're so far away from that and people are going to forget about this in a week, and Twitter is going to be as popular and whatever as it always was. I mean, the news cycle in this world with, I mean, we can, like, give up on a global pandemic after a week. We're not going to be that worried about Twitter in a week.

It's true, it's true, it's true.

By the way, something happened on the Twitter support account.

Well, they said at some point that they were blocking out the blue, you know, verified, but okay.

Yeah. So there was a website that was a fake website called Crypto for Health that was going around that was also trying to get people to give them bitcoin under the. Under the. What do you call it?

Under the guise of being, like, charity. Yeah, that was the first round. Like, that's what I noticed. Like, first it was like, Binance, Gemini cz, Justin Tron. All the actual, like, crypto people were like. It was like, that was one scam. And then all of a sudden it became the, like, send me a thousand, I'll send you 2000 from all the much bigger accounts with, like, you know, worldwide general reach. So that was a kind of weird thing.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. They were the first ones out there saying that they would give 5,000 bitcoin back to the community. 5,000 bitcoin. That's a lot of.

That's a lot of bitcoin from every exchange.

Yeah. So that's where it all started. And let's see. Yeah, if you guys have any other. You guys in the chat have any other questions for Scott or us about what's going on, we can answer them for you. I think, Scott, it was a pleasure having you on. Do you have anything additional you'd like to say to everyone who's watching about your experience or about these scams in general and what you think of them?

Yeah, I would say, in general. Like I said, I think this will pass, but I think it definitely shines a light on the importance of, you know, taking your security seriously. I think that, you know, it's one of the barriers to mainstream adoption is that people don't really understand, you know, that or want the responsibility of being your own bank, and that's effectively what you are in this space. So, you know, this has nothing to do with your bitcoin getting hacked or stolen. This is just an old, classic scam that happens to be using bitcoin instead of dollars. But it should awaken you to the fact that these hackers are out there, they're active, and, you know, they will. You will eventually get sim swapped, you will eventually get hacked. All these things will eventually happen to you, no matter who you are. And so really, it's just another kick in the ass to, like, take your security very, very seriously. And, you know, and there's a million ways to do that. That's a long conversation, but. And besides that, I would say it also, especially for people in a position like me, who Twitter is a foundational part of their life, you know, and you have a big following and you value that to understand that there really is counterparty risk. Anytime you have sort of a central point of failure in your life, right? Like if you're a person who depends on Twitter, say, for your income or, you know, or an influencer or any. This is where you do your marketing, whatever it is. Realize that you have. If that could all be taken away in a minute, right? Twitter goes down, they kick you off. I mean, we saw Pump got taken off Twitter for a couple days, you know, because it could be some bunch of people report you, brute force attack, they all team up on you, whatever it is. I think it's very important to understand that you should diversify your audience, get your information from more than one place, build other things, and don't depend on one single platform. And we've seen it on YouTube. Right. I mean, how many crypto accounts were taken down on YouTube over that period of a few months? Some never got them back. So if you are someone who did, go ahead.

The same thing applies if you keep your bitcoin on a centralized exchange at the end of the day.

Absolutely centralized point of failure can prove you should never. Yeah, and yeah, that's definitely a part of what I'm saying with security, you know, really like get it offline, you know, get your wallet in a safe, get your, you know, your personal. Get your private keys in a different safe, really take the steps. It's annoying and it is what it is, but once you send it away or someone grabs it, it's gone. That's really not something you'll sleep well at night knowing. So, you know, get.

Get your.

Get it together.

Well, thank you so much for that insight, Scott. I really appreciate it. I think we've got a really good sense of what it feels like to be at the center point of this whole fixture.

Well, thank you, guys, man. I always appreciate.