Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary’s Twitter account was hacked on Thursday and began pushing a shady giveaway of bitcoin and ethereum.
The Twitter account of the famous investor, which is followed by more than 982,000 users, sent out several tweets about the gift of 5,000 BTC and 15,000 ETH, along with an image listing the 5,000 BTC and 5,000 ETH.
“Everyone who wants to get free cryptocurrency now has a chance here!” he said in a now deleted tweet. The O’Leary Twitter account further claimed that it was not hacked and that the giveaway was not a scam. It also falsely claimed that Mr. Wonderful said on CNBC that he would actually give away some cryptocurrency.
The tweet provided a link for anyone involved in the crypto giveaway scam incident, prompting respondents to first verify their wallet address to send their digital asset funds.
Notably, crypto giveaway scams are one of the most prevalent forms of scams in the industry. These often include hacked accounts of famous people, politicians, celebrities and companies that are used to promote counterfeit gifts.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, former Microstrategy CEO Michael Saylor, Binance CEO CZ, and other prominent figures are commonly targets of scammers, who try to impersonate them and promote their scams using fake accounts. We do.
Notably, the scammers in the O’Leary giveaway used the same website they created for the fake Tesla and Elon Musk giveaways. The website was also riddled with grammatical errors and had the Tesla logo at the top and was hosted on a website with the name Tesla in the URL.
O’Leary, who has become a vocal supporter of Web3 technology, recently revealed that he has lost almost all $15 million Now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX paid him to be its official spokesperson. He said at the time:
“The total deal was less than $15 million, all in. I invested about $9.7 million in crypto. I think that’s what I’ve lost. I don’t know It’s all zero. I don’t know because my account got hacked a few weeks back. All the data, all the coins, everything.”
“It was not a good investment […] I don’t make good investments all the time, fortunately, I make more good investments than bad, but that was a bad one.
O’Leary was among a long list of celebrities who aggressively promoted FTX online. When O’Leary first started promoting FTX, he said that it was FTX’s compliance system that attracted him to invest in the crypto exchange.
As noted, FTX investors have filed a class action Lawsuits against several celebrities promoting the platform including Kevin O’Leary, Golden State Warriors, Shaquille O’Neal, Udonis Haslem, David Ortiz, Naomi Osaka, and others.
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