The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said on Thursday the massive hacking operation of verified accounts on Twitter the day prior was part of a plot to “perpetuate cryptocurrency fraud.”
The FBI’s San Francisco Division told Sputnik in a Thursday statement via email it was “investigating the incident involving several Twitter accounts belonging to high profile individuals that occurred on July 15, 2020. At this time, the accounts appear to have been compromised in order to perpetuate cryptocurrency fraud.”
By the time Twitter caught onto the scam and shut it down, the capers made off with $121,000 in bitcoins, according to an analysis by bitcoin compliance firm Elliptic.
The incident has also prompted Twitter to delay the introduction of its new application programming interface (API), which was slated for Thursday.
The Senate Commerce Committee has also invited Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to testify before the committee within the next week, saying in a letter the incident is “of great concern to the committee” as it “combines the need to protect users from fraud with larger concerns about social manipulation and disinformation online.”
In a series of updates posted on Thursday by the Twitter Support account, the social media giant noted it had “no evidence that attackers accessed passwords. Currently, we don’t believe resetting your password is necessary.”
Sourse: sputniknews.com
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