The Twitter account of the Lebanese Annahar newspaper was recently hacked and used for cryptocurrency scams.
It became clear that something was wrong with Annahar’s Twitter account when its name was abruptly changed to “Elon Musk” and its famous logo was replaced by a photo of a SpaceX rocket — the same one that is currently Elon Musk’s Twitter profile photo.
For some context, Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, is known for his somewhat erratic promotion of cryptocurrency on many occasions, especially the meme-born dogecoin.
This has given rise to a new market of online scams that use Elon Musk’s credentials and profile photos on social media to trick unsuspecting users into losing their bitcoin and other currencies.
Though the majority of those scammers are amateur online identity thieves, some take it a step further by hacking verified accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers and transforming them into fake Elon Musk accounts, in an attempt at boosting their credibility.
This is exactly what happened in the case of Annahar, whose Twitter account was briefly used by hackers to promote scams in threads of Elon Musk’s tweets before being finally recovered.
Though its name has been fixed and the scam tweets deleted, the account remains without a profile photo, as of the time of writing.
