“I am giving back to the community,” began a tweet sent out by a number of high-profile Twitter users including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and former Vice President Joe Biden. A hacker, or hackers, gained access to a significant number of the platform’s highest-profile users. And with that access, they executed a fairly basic double-your-money scam: Whatever you paid these suddenly-generous billionaires in Bitcoin, they’d pay twice as much back within 30 minutes.
The Bitcoin wallet -- the address people were asked to send their money -- listed in the tweets was soon receiving donations. Between 4PM ET, when the attack began, and 6PM ET, when Twitter locked down all verified accounts to deal with the crisis, more than $118,000 had been paid. That’s a small amount of cash given that Twitter believes the attack used social-engineering to trick a high-level employee.
Bitcoin is a great currency to use for criminal transactions because it has no central bank or overarching authority to resolve disputes or combat fraud. One thing it does have in its favor, however, is that the ledger of all Bitcoin transactions is public, and searchable. Which means that, while difficult, it’s entirely possible to follow the source and destination of the money handed over.
In this, like with every other major Bitcoin scam, it’s relatively easy to trace the source of any transaction back to an exchange. That’s the place where people can turn their US dollars into Bitcoin (or back again), which can then be investigated by authorities. This is how the Department of Justice tracked down the Russian agents involved in the 2016 elections.
For the individual, or individuals, who have scored $118,000 as part of this audacious hack, what now? At the time of writing, all but $114 of that $118,000 haul has been transferred to other wallets. But those transactions are still just as visible as the current ones, so how can a person get that cash out of the system without getting a visit from the feds?