By
Kseniia Klichova
April 19th, 2024
The hackers took over the Twitter profile of Gate.io and offered a prize of 500 USDT to the first 1,000 winners. With the help of PeckShield, Gate.io managed to get access back to its account.
Phishing scam cases in the crypto space have been on a severe rise over the last few months targeting social media accounts of valid businesses. In one such incident, hackers took over the official Twitter account of crypto exchange Gate.io.
This exposed nearly 1 million Gate.io followers to the risk of a fraudulent Tether giveaway. Twitter is one of the social media platforms with the most active crypto community. Thus, there’s a growing trend of hacking into Twitter profiles of verified accounts to promote scams.
The tweet posted by the hacker offered a prize of 500 USDT to the first 1,000 winners. While pretending to be Gate.io’s official website, the hacker asked Twitter followers to connect their wallets to the phishing website.
Blockchain security and data analytics firm PeckShield was quick to jump into the matter. They helped Gate.io regain control of its verified account and thus remove the malicious advertisement. The total number of defrauded victims remains unknown. Peckshield said:
“Seems like crypto-exchange Gate[.]io’s verified Twitter account @gate_io was compromised & has been used to share links to fraudulent $USDT GIVEAWAY. gąte[.]com is the phishing site”.
Later, Gate.io also released a post on the development of the matter. “We were made aware as soon as it happened, we have put out a notice and the account was locked down soon after being compromised,” it stated.
Other Phishing Scam Incidents Last Week
Over the last week, there were multiple such phishing incidents reported in the crypto space. In another such incident, a hacker stole nearly $300k in OHM tokens from OlympusDAO. However, the hacker decided to return the tokens a few hours later. PeckShield tweeted:
“It seems the related @OlympusDAO’s BondFixedExpiryTeller contract has a redeem() function that does not properly validate the input, resulting in ~$292K loss”.
The hacker could have obtained 3.3 million dollars had he reported the code flaw. Since January 2022, the DAO has been offering rewards to those who have detected errors and caused million-dollar losses of funds.
In another such incident of the phishing attack, hackers stole the API keys from the trading bot platform 3Commas and conducted unauthorized trades for DMG trading pairs on the crypto exchange FTX.