Crypto Crooks Push Musk, XRP Scam in Weekend Hacking Spree

Crypto scammers went on a rampage over the weekend, hijacking an official South Korean government YouTube channel along with accountancy giant PwC’s Twitter account to promote the scam.

South Korea’s YouTube channel was commandeered on Saturday and renamed “SpaceX Invest.” Hackers then posted a crypto-related video followed by an interview with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Yonhap News reported.

Around the same time, the Venezuelan arm of PwC’s Twitter account tweeted more than a dozen links to a classic crypto scam.

The links led to a fake Ripple Labs website that encouraged users to send ripple (XRP) to a specific address, after which they were promised more in return. The account posted: “Want to see how #XRP will make you rich?” and “#XRP gogogo” among other slogans.

It took at least eight hours for PwC Venezuela’s Twitter account to be cleaned up, while South Korea’s YouTube channel was restored after about four hours. Google Korea and Seoul’s cybercrime unit are now investigating the incident.

The hack is the third such instance against South Korea’s official YouTube channels in a week, with one run by the Korea Tourism Organization operating illegitimately last Thursday and Friday.

A YouTube channel belonging to South Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art was also compromised on Thursday, The Korea Herald reported.

Twitter and YouTube have long been criticized as platforms for promoting crypto scams, dating back to 2018. Scams often exploit the likenesses of unwitting celebrities, including MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor and Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin.

Musk called out YouTube earlier this year, claiming it was not doing enough to tackle fake ads using his identity to promote crypto scams.

Although not an attempted scam, cyber security researchers described a recent scam campaign where they bought legitimate YouTube ads for creepy ‘SpaceX’ themed tokens, which can be purchased via Uniswap. YouTube said in June that it was removing channels reported to be promoting crypto scams.

At the height of public interest in crypto starting this year, Meta’s social media platform Facebook was also targeted by hackers for much the same purpose – to swindle capital from potential crypto investors.

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