Hackers Took Over U.K.’s Tesco And Promoted A Bitcoin Scam

Hackers took over the Twitter account of the U.K. giant supermarket chain Tesco and promoted a Bitcoin (BTC) scam and the altcoin news reached our website via the IT magazine Bleeping Computer.

According to the reports in the magazine published on June 25, Tesco has almost 550,000 Twitter followers and they lost control over their profile after the hackers took over and started claiming free bitcoin giveaways in return for investments. The hackers apparently had an affinity with the founder of Microsoft Bill Gates since they were using his avatar and even changed the name into ‘’BillGatesmsc.’’

 “Bitcoin is on the rise again! One day, it will without doubt replace fiat currencies. I’d like to give back to the community, therefore any bitcoin you send to this address, I will send back double! Comment your BTC address below when done.”

This was one of the deleted tweets similar in style to a previous scam involving the ethereum (ETH) cryptocurrency which swamped Twitter last year. The address that the hackers supplied never received any funds since Tesco regained access immediately to its account, deleting all of the traces of this happening. It is still uncertain how the hackers managed to compromise the account since the timing seems to be deliberate. As mentioned in the latest cryptocurrency news, Bitcoin is currently trading at its highest point since the major 2017 crash. The cryptocurrency was returned to public consciousness since there was extremely large media coverage. Andreas Antonopoulos even wrote last week about the increasing dominance of the scammers this year:

“It’s been about a month since this new wave of scammers started up again. Last time was August-December 2017. The price dump in crypto made them go away and now they’re back.”

Scams such as this one with Tesco will continue to appear outside the crypto industry as well. Sweden’s government, for example, had another recent victim. Back in April, attackers managed to tweet that the country changed the official currency to Bitcoin. The person responsible for the tweet stated that he has personal political leanings which formed his motivation to take over the government’s account and said that he believes Socialism is wrong.