The official Twitter account of the Federation of Enterprises in Belgium (FEB), a non-profit organization focused on promoting various businesses in the European nation, appears to have been compromised.
The attacker(s) had first changed the hacked account’s display name to “Coinbase” and claimed it was an “official promotion account” of the San Francisco-based digital currency exchange, Coinbase.
Fake Coinbase Affliate Account Used To Lure Unsuspecting Users
After gaining control of FEB’s account, the hackers had been promoting fake giveaways, which have become quite common on social media sites. In one tweet (now deleted), the fake Coinbase affiliate account had been celebrating the exchange’s impressive growth in the number of users.
As first reported by Cointelegraph, the @VBOFEB verified Twitter handle is still being used to target over 11k followers of the Belgian non-profit’s social media account. There are several Coinbase-related images that have been posted to the hacked account, which has now changed its display name back to VBO-FEB.
Encouraging Users To Sign Up By Sending Small Amounts Of Crypto
Although most of the Coinbase branding has now been removed from FEB’s Twitter account, there are many retweets from the US-based exchange’s official Twitter account that still remain in the hacked account’s feed.
The scam giveaway tweets that were sent from the compromised FEB account had reportedly been asking users to send a small amount of digital currency to addresses listed by the hackers.
According to Cointelegraph, the scammers’ tweets had been encouraging users to sign up for a fake 3,000 bitcoin (BTC) giveaway.
The fraudulent giveaway was reportedly being conducted to “celebrate” Coinbase’s user base growth to over 30,000.000 active traders. It became obvious that the account had been hacked as there were many grammatical errors and “inconsistent number formatting” used in the tweets sent by the fraudsters.
“Giving Away” 3,000 BTC To Celebrate 30k Coinbase Users
As of November 2017, there were over 13 million users that had registered on Coinbase, however the tweets sent from FEB’s compromised account said the American exchange had just registered more than “30,000.00”, or thirty thousand, users. The fake giveaway tweet also read: “We [are] giving … away 3,000 BTC.”
In October 2018, Ran Neuner, the host of CNBC’s Crypto Trader show, revealed there were over 25 million traders that had registered on Coinbase. NeuNer also informed his followers that there were approximately 600,000 active users on the digital currency trading platform.
As CryptoGlobe reported, scammers have promoted fake giveaways involving billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk. Other social media websites including Instagram have been used to lure unsuspecting users into many different types of fraudulent crypto-related giveaways or scams.
