According to the publication of the famous Bitcoin-guru, Andreas Antonopoulos, the accounts were hacked due to the hack of the Twitter API posting service.
Almost all the tweets of the hacked accounts contained the same message – about an alleged partnership with a certain company “CryptoForHealth” and an organization (of course fake) of giveaway worth 5,000 Bitcoins. The essence of this false giveaway is simple – you send your bitcoins to the address indicated in the tweet and get 2 times more back.
No matter how ridiculous it may sound, there were hundreds of users who fell for this scam and by the time of writing this article, the hacker had already received more than 12 Bitcoins!
Twitter – a multi-billion dollar company with a huge staff could not predict such a simple vulnerability due to which some users have lost all their savings and are unlikely to be able to get them back.
What am I getting at? No matter how much you trust companies, intermediaries, the protection of your savings depends only on you. If you are worried about how not to fall for the bait of a scammer and not lose your PIVs and other cryptocurrencies, there are methods to minimizing the risks:
- Encrypt your wallet and store your password and wallet.dat in a safe place (preferably in 2 locations)
- Do not get fooled by promotions, giveaways on social networks (telegram, twitter, discord, facebook, and so on). With a high degree of probability, this will be a deception. If you still want to participate in some kind of action, carefully study the account of the organization conducting this action (its previous activity, posts, users, study the website) and do not rush to participate. See if others will participate and if anyone complains about the promotion or company.
- Never reply to strangers in chats (telegram, discord). They will most likely ask you to “invest” somewhere. If a person familiar to you writes to you and you do not have a chat history, check if this is really that user. However, even the user with whom you have been in contact for a long time can deceive you, so never invest in people you do not know personally and invest only in person!
- An official member of the PIVX community will never write to you first! For your safety, the entire list of PIVX contributors is available here.
- Never download programs, documents, pictures, or other files sent by unfamiliar users, or bots that pretend to be PIVX bots. All the necessary files for your successful work are always available only on the official website PIVX.org
- If you need technical assistance, please write only in the general discord chat, in the #support section.
And most importantly, if you are in doubt, don’t risk! If you need help, our PIVX community is always happy to help you!
Be careful!
