Joe Biden took advantage of a Twitter trick on Wednesday afternoon to ask for donations for his campaign.
“I don’t have Bitcoin, and I will never ask you to send me any,” the former vice president wrote on Twitter.
“But if you want to contribute to making Donald Trump a one-term president, you can do it here,” he said, linking to his campaign’s donations page.
Apparent scammers hacked the Twitter accounts of many prominent names, including Biden himself, to ask for Bitcoin donations.
The ruse included fake tweets from Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Mike Bloomberg, Kanye West, and several tech billionaires, including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The hacked tweets offered to send $ 2,000 for every $ 1,000 sent to a bitcoin address.
Publicly available bitcoin records show the scammer’s account has already received hundreds of transfers totaling more than $ 100,000 as of 6:30 p.m. ET. The account has transferred about half of that amount, but experts warned that scammers sometimes seem to distribute money to make their accounts appear legitimate.
THE BIDEN TWITTER ACCOUNT HACKED IN A WIDE RANGE ‘SECURITY INCIDENT’ THAT WAS DIRECTED TO OBAMA, GATES, OTHERS
Almost an hour after the first accounts were hacked, Twitter released a statement saying it was aware of a “security incident affecting Twitter accounts.” The company said it was investigating and working to fix it and promised an update shortly. Later in the evening, many “verified” accounts on Twitter were unable to tweet, indicating that the site had activated a kill switch for high-profile accounts while the issue was under investigation.
Last month, Biden’s campaign emailed supporters highlighting “George Floyd’s last words” in a message that included a link for people to donate to the campaign, a move that sparked criticism from conservatives like Donald Trump Jr. on Wednesday.
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“‘I can’t breathe.'” I can’t breathe, “the email said.” George Floyd’s last words. But they did not die with him. They are still heard. They’re echoing in this nation. “The email didn’t directly ask people to donate to the Biden campaign, but at the bottom it included a button where recipients could click to” donate to choose Joe Biden. “
Gregg Re and Tyler Olson of Fox News contributed to this report.
