Earlier today, Bitcoin.org, the oldest cryptocurrency website registered by the founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, recently got hacked. Scammers ran a BTC giveaway scam with a promise to return double the amount users send to the named address. In the end, the scammers were reported to have collected $17,764 before the website was taken down. The website was inaccessible for a few hours after the incident, but normal service has been resumed.
To bring users’ attention to the hack, a pseudo-anonymous Twitter account with the name Cobra took to Twitter to reveal the news and claimed that the website may be offline for some days. He also clarified through his tweets that Bitcoin.org has never been hacked and that the breach must have been due to a lapse on the part of Cloudflare- the web provider that the website is hosted on.
“Bitcoin.org hasn’t been hacked, ever. We move to Cloudflare, and two months later we get hacked. Can you explain where you were routing my traffic too? Because my actual server didn’t get any traffic during the hack” he tweeted.
The scam on the website was perpetrated through a giveaway. Visitors on the website were greeted with a popup, asking them to send crypto to a Bitcoin wallet via a QR code and receive double the amount in return. The fake message showed that the Bitcoin Foundation was giving back to the community and that the giveaway will be limited to the first 10,000 people. This was made to draw more people into the scam. According to an analysis on the scam address done by Reddit Sleuth, it was presumed that a chunk of the 0.4BTC came from the scammers themselves to add an element of credibility to the claim. At the time of writing this report, Bitcoin.org is once again, back to life.
How popular is the Bitcoin giveaway scam?
Bitcoin giveaway scam is quite popular among hackers as it allows them to make fast money without tampering with anyone’s wallet. In 2020, Twitter handles of top crypto celebrities, politicians and influencers were hacked to run Bitcoin giveaways. While the scammers were apprehended, the value of Bitcoin was not affected.
Today’s scam on Bitcoin.org did not affect the price of the coin either. Despite the Evergrande debt crisis and the fluctuations bedevilling the crypto market within the week, Bitcoin increased by 2.05% within the last 24 hours, thereby moving from $42,789 to $44,378.
