Just 14 days into 2019 and we have already experienced a crypto scam involving a hacked twitter account. On January 14th, the national cricket organisation of South Africa fell victim to hackers promoting a fraudulent Bitcoin (BTC) lottery. 

Ball Tampering

Cricket South Africa (CSA) tweeted their alleged participation to over 1 million followers early in the morning on January 14th, 2018. They managed to fool the public by claiming that CSA started a partnership with Luno for a Bitcoin lottery. Luno is a cryptocurrency wallet service based in the United Kingdom.

The tweet (that was quickly deleted) stated winners could win a prize of 20BTC (R970,800). To get involved, users must simply send 0.01 BTC to the hacker’s Bitcoin address.

Saved by the Wicket Keeper

During this chaos, it was the official Twitter account of the International Cricket Council (@ICC) that took the initiative, informing followers that the CSA Twitter account was hacked.

🚨 Please be aware that the @OfficialCSA Twitter account has been compromised. Our friends in South Africa are working hard to resolve the situation quickly.

Please do not click on any links or engage with the account until such time as this is rectified. pic.twitter.com/wJmk2v4sWg

— ICC (@ICC) January 14, 2019

These attempts at phishing are fairly common in the cryptocurrency space. Be that as it may, most of these scams are fairly easy to avoid. Most of these Ponzi schemes and scams that pop up in the crypto space mainly target newcomers to cryptocurrency. With this in mind, we have blog posts about how to best go about avoiding scams such as; How to avoid Crypto Phishing Scams, Hackers Targeting Ethereum Miners, and a review of the authenticity of SAFCOIN. Once you learn how to start doing your own due diligence into whatever you’re investing in, you’ll begin to see which opportunities are real and which ones are fake.

Another day, another crypto scam

This isn’t the first impersonation attack to hit Africa. Just last year many Twitter accounts fell victim to hackers in an attempt to impersonate Elon Musk. In fact, one of these accounts were able to steal as much as R2,329,977 ($170,000). They did this simply by impersonating the CEO of Tesla by changing the name and profile pictures of the stolen accounts to match that of Elon Musk’s. To emphasize, it’s not hard to pull off one of these scams to the uninformed.

Because of this, people should stay vigilant when investing your money into anything. Do your research. If something looks fishy, keep this in mind, it’s probably a crypto scam. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency scams have become a frequent and somewhat problematic issue for users but they can easily be avoided.

What do you think of these scams? Most notably, have you fallen victim to one? Let us know in the comments below!