16th July, 2020
By Tobi Onanuga
Official Twitter handles belonging to high profile individuals such as Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Bill Gates were hacked Wednesday to promote a Bitcoin scam.
Others affected were Elon Musk, Kanye West, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett and the world’s richest man Jeff Bezos.
Hacked people and organisations include Gemini, #Binance, Binance’s CEO, #Coinbase, CoinDesk, and KuCoin, said Hacker News.
According to Bloomberg, all the compromised accounts sent out tweets promising to double the money sent by anyone sending money via Bitcoin within the next 30 minutes.
The official twitter handles of Uber and Apple posted similar tweets with the scam soon after.
Apple Twitter account , with over 4.6 million followers, was devoid of any tweet at 22.50 GMT.
Cybersecurity news platform The Hacker News said the bitcoin account involved had already received nearly $1,060,000.
One unconfirmed report said the scammers may have stolen as much as $10m.
Twitter says it is investigating the issue. And later put on hold thousands of verified accounts, including P.M.NEWs account.
“You may be unable to Tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident”, Twitter said..
Twitter shares declined 2.3% post market.
Some of the messages sent out by the hackers: 
