Hackers recently targeted the Twitter account of the Federation of Enterprises in Belgium (FEB). FEB is a non-profit organization that aims to stimulate the interest of Belgian businesses. The scammers reportedly hacked the account of FEB and converted it into a fake account of US crypto exchange Coinbase. The account’s description read ‘Official Coinbase Promotion Account’. Its cover photos and profile featured Coinbase branding, also there was a link to the official Coinbase site.
However, the hackers were not able to alter the account’s handle, which remained @VBOFEB. It is the combination of the abbreviations of the association’s name in French and Dutch. Later via that account, they posted something that appeared to be a scam giveaway promotion. The impersonating account celebrated Coinbase’s user base growth in a tweet on Jan.9, which was later deleted.
Currently, the account name and Coinbase branding have been deleted from the Twitter account. But the retweets from Coinbase’s official account still are present in the account’s feed. The scammers earlier today posted a common crypto scam model on Twitter. And requested the followers to send a small amount of crypto to receive a huge amount in return as a part of the giveaway.
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3000 Bitcoin Giveaway Scam
They reportedly requested followers to participate in fraudulent 3,000 Bitcoin giveaway in order to celebrate the Coinbase’s user growth. Besides the Twitter account handle, the other signs that proved the account and the tweet were a scam were grammatical errors and inconsistent number formatting.
According to the scammer’s tweet, the Coinbase’s user base was ‘30,000.000’. As previously reported, in October Ran Neuner revealed that the Coinbase user accounts had reached 25 million at that time. With 600,000 users actively trading on the exchange daily.
The crypto-based giveaway scams on Twitter frequently involve scammers using popular names like Elon Musk and Charlie Lee. The scammers subtly alter the characters in the original accounts name to transform it into a dupe user account.
