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<!-- End of Brightcove iframe Player --></section><section class="text-description"><p>The scam has targeted high-profile Twitter users, such as Elon Musk, the SpaceX founder, and using them to ask followers to send a small amount of <a href="/latest/cryptocurrency" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">cryptocurrency</a> in exchange for a larger return at a later date.</p><p>Fake Twitter accounts have struck hundreds of times over the last two months, according to Sky News and blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis.</p><p>As much as £50,000 a day has been stolen by scammers before using a range of exchanges to convert the proceeds into cash.</p><p>The impersonators’ accounts can seem legitimate at first, but on closer inspection, they are sent from accounts with slight variations in the celebrities’ Twitter handles – such as @elounmussk, instead of @elonmusk.</p></section><section class="text-description"><p>One tweet from a fraudulent account read: “I have decided to give out 4000 ETH to my fans.</p><p>“Just send anywhere from 0.3 to 0.7 ETH to the address below and receive from 3 to 7 ETH back to your address.</p><p>“But hurry as it is limited to the first 200 participants only.”</p><p>Other impersonations include Vitalik Buterin, the principle investor of cryptocurrency ethereum.</p><p>He even took it upon himself to change his Twitter name, warning his followers of the scam.</p></section><section class="text-description"><!-- Start of Brightcove iframe Player -->
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<!-- End of Brightcove iframe Player --></section><section class="text-description"><p>Speaking on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOacA3RYrXk" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sky News</a>, Philip Gradwell, chief economist at Chainalysis said: “We can observe people sending ether to that scam address but, of course, we don’t see any ether being returned.</p><p>“I think one of the interesting things is from our investigation was that the patterns across the scammers were quite different.</p><p>“That actually suggests the scammers are different people.”</p><p>Twitter are now seeking to suspend fraudulent accounts but face the tough challenge of cracking down on the ever-growing numbers of scammers.</p><p>A spokesman told Sky News: “Our teams are overseeing a technological process of batch suspending these networks of offending accounts at scale and at speed.”</p></section><br><h2>Follow @davidlanz for real-time crypto news!<h2>