Key Takeaways
- The malicious tweet offered a prize of 500 USDT to the first 1,000 winners who claimed the reward by connecting their wallet to a fake phishing website.
- Gate.io has now regained control of its account and removed the giveaway tweet.
The WEB3 space is not devoid of hacks or phishing hacks; instead, it is often plagued by exploits and scams. On October 21, the official Twitter account of leading cryptocurrency exchange Gate.io was hacked to promote a phishing scam simulating a Giveaway of up to 500,000 USDT in rewards.
The malicious tweet offered a prize of 500 USDT to the first 1,000 winners who claimed the reward by connecting their crypto wallet to a fake phishing website, masquerading as Gate.io’s official webpage.
Once a user establishes a connection between their wallet and the fake website, the hackers will gain access to their existing funds and drain the assets. The Gate.io Twitter account hack was brought to light by blockchain investigator Peckshield.
“Seems like crypto-exchange Gate[.]io’s verified Twitter account @gate_io was compromised & has been used to share links to fraudulent $USDT GIVEAWAY”, PeckShield’s tweet reads.
Gate.io has now regained control of its Twitter account and removed the giveaway tweet. The number of victims scammed by this hack is yet to be confirmed.
Gate.io hack is, however, not the only hack to rock the crypto community this week. This week, a hacker exploited the DeFi Protocol Olympus DAO (OHM) smart contract for $300,000 worth of assets but later decided to return the stolen funds.OHM is the governance token for Olympus.
Recently, US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) acknowledged how increasingly crypto hacks via social media are these days. “Reports point to social media and crypto as a combustible combination for fraud. Nearly half the people who reported losing crypto to a scam since 2021 said it started with a post, ad, or message on a social media platform”, FTC’s press release from June 2022 reads.
Becoming financially literate and, more importantly, understanding that nobody will require you to buy crypto to sort out a problem or to protect your money is the only way to prevent getting defrauded by crypto scams.
