Retail Shopping Store Target Becomes Next ‘Bitcoin Giveaway’ Victim in Twitter Hack

Scammers of cryptocurrency enjoy flocking to Twitter to take over various official accounts, allowing them to promote scams that will ultimately reveal the delicate data of various cryptocurrency wallets.

This method of hacking accounts has become nearly synonymous with cryptocurrency as a whole, and it seems that scammers have found their latest victim – Target.

For a small time today, these hackers managed to take over the Twitter account of this retail giant, pushing users to engage in Bitcoin giveaway links, according to a report from TheNextWeb. Target has nearly two million followers, and there’s no way of knowing yet how many of them participated in the scheme. Luckily, the tweet isn’t active any more, but it was urging consumers to participate in a sweepstakes for a chance to win $30 million in Bitcoin.

It will be taken down at some point, so for the record: pic.twitter.com/is0av6MkY1

— Ernst Mulders (@ernstmul) November 13, 2018

Every single one of these scams reward consumers with nothing, leaving them with an empty wallet instead. To ensure that the fraud looks more legitimate, some of the scammers even made small transactions to their own wallet.

This isn’t the first of these scams. In fact, there have been multiple stories in the last few weeks about hackers taking over official accounts for the sake of this contest, though the amounts have varied.

Though Target was initially silent about the situation, TheNextWeb reported that the retail company confirmed the hack occurred in an email directly from Target. In the email, Target told TheNextWeb,

“Early this morning, Target’s Twitter account was inappropriately accessed. The access lasted for approximately half an hour and one fake tweet was posted during that time about a Bitcoin scam.”

Concluding, the email added, “We’re in close contact with Twitter, have deleted the tweet, and have locked the account while we investigate further.” So far, even with this press release, it still is unclear how the breach occurred. However, as Target said, they are in the process of continuing the investigation.

The issue that is even more worrisome has to be the skill level of these hackers. Any investor that wants to take part in a contest, airdrop, or any other activity that involves linking a crypto wallet should use legitimate websites from exchanges and the coins themselves.

Even though this was posted on a reputable Twitter account, it is always best to investigate further before personal data is provided.