- The Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts of the stock trading platform Robinhood were hacked and used to promote a scam.
- The hackers invited followers of the platform to buy a new token called “RBH” which had a value of $0.0005 per token.
- Approximately 10 people fell for the scam and bought around US$1,000 worth of the fake token before the Tweet was taken down.
An effective strategy that What criminals often follow is to hack the official account of a company that has a good reputation and is therefore trusted by users.
By having access to the official account, such as Twitter, Discord or Telegram accounts, they spread projects or links that aim to defraud people and, since in theory the followers trust the company, they believe that it is something legitimate.
However, there are some indications that allow the most expert users to realize that it is a scam and this was precisely what happened with the hack carried out on January 25 to the Robinhood Twitter account, however the most new ones may fall.
Users report suspicious activity
A Twitter user reported that Robinhood’s Twitter account had potentially been hacked as a tweet promoting what appeared to be a scam was posted due to prompting users to purchase a supposed “new” token.
The criminals posted a Tweet on the official account in which they they invited users to pay $0.0005 for a token called “RBH” on the BNB Smart Chain. Y according to a release posted on the Robinhood website, the hackers managed to post scams on the company’s official Instagram and Facebook as well
Twitter user ‘ZackXBT’ reported that the wallet that had benefited from the scam was hosted on Binance.
ee agreement with Conor Grogan, Head of Product Trading Operations at Coinbase, Approximately 10 people fell for the scam and bought around US$1,000 worth of the fake token before the Tweet was taken down. However, according to revision from the wallet associated with the scam, the scammers captured 26.95 BNB tokens.
All the publications that were made on the Robinhood account have already been deleted, the last official being one made on January 20.
Binance talks about it
Given the Binance was involved, CEO Changpeng Zhao tweeted that the security team had already blocked the linked account and were “awaiting further investigation.”
In it release Robinhood, the company said that, based on their ongoing investigation, they believe “that the source of the incident was through an external provider.”
Cryptocurrency is a booming industry, and as a result, criminals know that there is money flowing in the market. Therefore, they look for new strategies every day to achieve a leak of the flow of money in the direction of their accounts.
It is important to emphasize that this is not a problem of technology, nor of cryptocurrencies themselves. Scams happen in traditional markets quite frequently. However, it is a major obstacle.
Under this context, social networks have become a means through which criminals manage to deceive victims. It can be using phishing or, as was the case, encouraging the purchase of a fake token.
Anyone can be a victim of a scam! And, in order not to be, precautionary measures must be taken such as: researching a token in depth before deciding to invest, not clicking on strange links (even if the link comes from a presumably reliable source), always checking if the URL matches the legitimate URL, be suspicious; If it seems too good to be true, it’s probably a scam.
You might be interested in: