In a recent incident, hackers have again targeted the media account of Indian authorities and used it to promote scams. This time the Twitter account of the Indian High Commission was taken over by the scammers for their malicious intent.
Sources reveal that scammers used the Twitter account of the High Commission of India to Malawi to promote a Ripple (XRP) giveaway scam. High Commissions are diplomatic missions sent to Commonwealth countries. The targeted Twitter was a verified account with nearly 22,000 followers.
The hackers took over the account early Friday morning in the Indian time and posted content and comments in the name of popular XRP community influencer WrathofKahneman (@WKahneman).
Reportedly, it appears to be the same group of scammers that gained access to News 24’s Twitter account, as it promotes the same scam giveaway. News 24 is a popular Hindi news channel and The Twitter account appeared to operate as usual, posting news updates despite the potential breach.
The post directs users to a blog post purportedly authored by Brad Garlinghouse, Chief Executive Officer of Ripple. It claims that the blockchain payments firm is offering access to a 100,000,000 XRP airdrop pool to appreciate its supporters, luring unsuspecting individuals to click on a registration link.
At the time of writing, there have been no reports of users losing assets to the Ripple giveaway scam. It also remains unclear why the scammers have recently chosen to exploit verified Hindi Twitter accounts.
Unfortunately, scams like this are no longer uncommon in the crypto space or finance in general and have seen users lose fortunes due to brief lapses in judgment. Prior to this, the account of the Indian Embassy to Oman was hacked by crypto scammers in September last year to promote a similar XRP scam.
Former Pakistani prime minister and current head of one of the biggest political parties in the nation, Imran Khan, also acknowledged that hackers gained access to his Instagram account and exploited it to spread a Bitcoin giveaway fraud.
In July last year, the British military’s Twitter with 363K followers retweeted various posts advertising non-fungible token (NFT) scams before they were taken out by Twitter. Simultaneously, their Youtube account with over 177K subscribers, was renamed “Ark Invest.” Again crypto content uploaded by the scammers that included four live videos promoting crypto giveaway scams was uploaded to the account.