Tesco's Twitter Hacked

Tesco's Twitter account was hacked - the hackers tried to exploit a scam which extorts Bitcoins from the customers.

Description of the scam

Tesco, one of the leading British supermarkets, has over half a million followers on Twitter. On June 24, administrators were unable to access the account as hackers have changed the name and started to post adverse content. It's probable that hackers either have some sort of connection with the founder of Microsoft Bill Gates or that they are his fans because they set his photo as account's avatar and changed the name to "Billgatesmsc".

The @tesco account has mysteriously morphed into Bill Gates pic.twitter.com/PSRCZ5ZT95

— carpet (@WHS_Carpet) 24 czerwca 2019

One of the tweets included a link to the wallet to which followers were supposed to donate their Bitcoin in order to get back twice as more in return. In 2018 it was a very popular trick, especially on Twitter. Many famous characters in the industry decided to add special annotations to the names of their accounts, e.g. "Non-giver of Ether" in the case of Vitalik Buterin. Hacker's operation turned out to be completely unsuccessful in this case because not even a single transaction was carried out in aforementioned wallet.

Scams in Europe

Scams regarding social media in general, not Twitter only, are very common in Great Britain. The local reports in May reported over 1800 scams totalling nearly 27 million pounds. 80% of these cases were strictly connected to cryptocurrencies. Not so long ago even the Swedish government's account got hacked. In April, the hackers took control of the Twitter account and announced that Sweden is about to change the official national currency for Bitcoin in the near future. One of the hackers, when asked about the motives of this action, openly admitted that he simply considered socialism as a bad policy.