- Cricket South Africa’s Twitter handle was hacked and used to send out tweets about a fake crypto lottery
- The account asked users to send 0.01 BTC to a Bitcoin address
- The account has since been recovered by CSA
Scams are one of the most unpleasant parts of the blockchain industry. Scammers have gone to great lengths to get people to fall for their tricks, even impersonating and using the image of prominent individuals to do so. This has led to many everyday people falling for crypto scams and it seems that even prominent organizations are not immune to this. Such is also the case with the recent incident in which Cricket South Africa (CSA), South Africa’s Official cricket Body, fell victim to a fake crypto lottery on Monday.
Never trust crypto giveaways
The official Cricket South Africa (CSA) twitter account, which has over a million followers, was compromised by hackers who used it to promote a scam. The account tweeted that it has begun a partnership with Luno, a British cryptocurrency Wallet, in which winners of a lottery could win 20 BTC.
The account then asked its followers to send 0.01 BTC to a bitcoin address to participate.
Once the Twitter account was back under the control of CSA, they immediately deleted the tweets and warned followers not to respond to it or send any money to the address.
“Apologies to all our Twitter followers who were affected by the hack overnight,” they said.
Luno has also come out to refute the claims of a partnership with CSA or any lottery being underway.
“We distance ourselves from this tweet that is going around. We have not partnered with (CSA),” Luno has stated.
As of now, PPC Newlands Cricket still has a tweet up about the fake giveaway, though it is expected to be taken down soon.
The silver lining to this situation is that the Bitcoin address used for the fake giveaway only has a balance of 0.02 BTC, which implies that only two people fell for the scam.
The systemic issue with scams
Online scams and fake giveaways are probably as old as the internet itself. From the early days of email scams to the popular scam of offering people free iPhones over the internet, many internet users have become very aware of them and know to ignore them.
The issue is that the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry is very new and as a such, those who are not familiar with it will be more vulnerable to these scams.