The last 24 hours have been full of confusion for Nigerians and cryptocurrency enthusiast around the world. On April 14th, The verified @APCNigeria twitter account was stolen by an unknown hacker.

Shortly after, the hacker posted the following tweets that have since been deleted:

“I bought this account for 2k $ from the official owner.”

“Our government has created a website in order to give you bitcoin. We love our people, enjoy!”

“We are going to raise wages, and for this we want to celebrate this, and give everyone the bitcoins.”

It was clear by this point that the attacker is a cryptocurrency scammer. The attacker is planning to use the reputation of the account to scam people out of their cryptocurrency. The verified twitter badge and 719k strong twitter following are enough to fool even savvy individuals.

Soon after gaining control, the hacker changed the name on the twitter account to be “Justin Sun”, the founder of a top cryptocurrency called TRON. A scary thing to note is that even after the name change, the verified Twitter badge remained active on the account. We believe this was an attempt to scam people interested in the TRON coin. Later, the hacker changed the name on the account to read “Electra Coin (ECA)” presumably in an attempt to scam those interested in the ECA coin.

A few hours later the name on the twitter account reads Binance, one of the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. The hacker has been very active under this persona, replying to tweets including one from the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin claiming to offer free Ethereum to those who visit a phishing website created to steal your funds. They even retweet tweets made by the official Binance account warning of impersonators such as themselves!

As with before, the verified twitter badge remains with new and old tweets

At the time of writing, the attacker has changed the name to “John McAfee” and is sending out links to phishing websites that claim to offer free bitcoin, but trick you into revealing your private keys so that they can steal it instead.

Twitter has been rife with cryptocurrency scams, often times in the form of accounts impersonating influencers and sending out tweets with links to phishing attacks. The problem is so bad that Buterin often has to warn his followers:

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UPDATE 10:23AM EST: Since the release of this article, our twitter account @tokens_express was blocked by the hacked @APCNigeria twitter account

UPDATE 2:25PM EST: Our twitter account @tokens_express has been suspended for unknown reasons. Meanwhile the hacked @APCNigeria twitter account is actively scamming twitter users with a verified twitter badge.