Crypto Hackers Promote Fake XRP Airdrop on News24 Twitter Account

A recent bitcoin scheme targeted the Twitter account of News24, one of India’s top news stations. Hackers exploited company security to post phishing links for a phony XRP drop, encouraging consumers to click and potentially be duped.

Crypto scammers had already hijacked India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Twitter account, as well as the profiles of the Indian Medical Association (IMA), the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), and Mann Deshi Mahila Bank.

Wrongdoers took over News24’s Twitter account and advertised bogus Ripple events, such as an XRP airdrop. To garner people’s faith, they linked corrupted URLs and even displayed the image of Ripple’s CEO, Brad Galinghouse.

Needless to say, there was no such airdrop, raising the possibility that some of News24’s 1.4 million followers were duped. Some phony announcements are still accessible on the outlet’s Twitter account, indicating that it either did not detect the problem or was unable to deal with the attackers.

Now, India has emerged as a hotspot for such scams. At the end of 2021, hackers accessed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s official Twitter profile and released a false post claiming that the country had embraced bitcoin as legal cash and that the government had purchased 500 BTC to distribute to the populace.

It was unclear how many people were duped by the scam, but given Modi’s 87 million followers, the number might have been large.

A month later, bad actors broke into the Twitter accounts of the Indian Medical Association (IMA), the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), and Mann Deshi Mahila Bank. They posted a number of tweets depicting Elon Musk, who appeared to be promoting cryptocurrency.

As CryptoPotato recently highlighted, cryptocurrency users should be wary of another scam involving the Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution, Arbitrum.

Scammers saturated the space with false project airdrops and phishing websites, which, when clicked, can result in money loss for customers. Arbitrum News DAO reported discovering over 270 similar sites.