New York (AFP)
The Twitter accounts of American personalities, including Bill Gates, Elon Musk or Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and large companies like Apple and Uber were victims Wednesday afternoon of a massive piracy of cryptocurrencies.
Messages, quickly erased by the targeted accounts, invited Internet users in particular to send bitcoins to specific addresses, claiming to send back in exchange double the amounts transferred.
"Happy Wednesday! I offer bitcoins to all my subscribers. I double all payments sent to the bitcoin address below", notably read Twitter users on the account of Elon Musk, the whimsical boss of You're here.
The accounts of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg posted messages for a while to similar content.
"We can confirm that this tweet was not sent by Bill Gates. This seems to be part of a larger problem that Twitter is facing. Twitter is aware of this and is working to restore the account," said a spokesperson. word of Mr. Gates to AFP.
Twitter indeed said "to examine" the situation and assured that a press release would be published soon.
The company's stock fell 4% on Wall Street in electronic trading after the close.
© 2020 AFP