The Bitcoin that was defrauded from the massive Twitter hack this morning is currently moving across a number of wallets, with one transaction containing a cryptic message
Recent developments on the mass Twitter hack that occurred yesterday, reveal that the defrauded Bitcoin is already being transferred and that secret messages appeared to be hidden in the transactions.
Chainalysis, a cryptocurrency tracing firm, is currently following the four wallets that have been associated with the attack. The biggest transfer that was facilitated was to an address that received $120,000 in bitcoins from 375 transactions. Other secondary addresses received $6,700 in bitcoins across 100 transactions, while an XRP wallet did not receive anything.
As of writing, a wallet with associations that have not yet been revealed has received a total of five bitcoins ($46,055).
Maddie Kennedy, a spokesperson from Chainalysis, has reassured the public that the company is “collaborating with our customers to find leads from this wallet.”
Chainalysis explained that part of the scam’s modus operandi relied on the hackers transferring their own cryptocurrencies between different wallets to exaggerate the number of people that looked like they were donating.
The single largest victim of this hack was a Japanese wallet that sent scammers over $40,000 in Bitcoin.
In addition, a user was found to have sent 0.00005348 Bitcoin (a little over half a dollar) stretched across seven different transactions to the wallet that is currently associated with the Twitter hack. Eagle-eyed crypto enthusiasts noticed that the sender, who has yet to be identified, spent 0.00121639 BTC (approximately $11.19) to send this message:
“Just Read All Transaction Outputs As Text You Take Risk When Use Bitcoin For Your Twitter Game Bitcoin is Traceable Why Not Monero.”
It is still unclear whether the message was meant for the scammers behind the hack or the victims of the scam.
The Twitter accounts of several high-profile celebrities, politicians, and tech companies were hacked and used to post a message that encouraged users to donate to a scam website named Crypto For Health, which masqueraded as a charity organisation working on raising funds for community healthcare workers.
Notable personalities and entities that were targeted in the mass hacking include Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Kanye West, Apple, Uber, Binance, Hemini, CoinDesk, Coinbase, Justin Sun, Charlie Lee and more.
Twitter netizens raised the alarm when they noticed that all the messages appeared to be copied and pasted across all the hacked accounts.