Bitcoin Forum

https://i.imgur.com/ax9RJGY.png

I was shocked to see that the Indian prime minister announced bitcoin as a legal tender in India and also giving away free bitcoin but to my disappointment it was done after his account was hacked.

PM Modi’s Twitter handle ‘briefly compromised’, bitcoin giveaway link shared (https://indianexpress.com/article/india/prime-minister-narendra-modi-twitter-hack-bitcoin-7668424/)

The official Twitter account of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was hacked in order for the hackers to scam people.


https://cointelegraph.com/news/indian-prime-minister-modi-s-hacked-twitter-account-attempts-btc-scam


A possible means to scam.

How come his twitter account get hacks and that too for the 2nd time ?
The prime minister twitter account should have the highest possible security and password  standards. This is something which should not be ignored.

Any idea who hacked the account  ???

Careless online activities.

Probably under investigation, but likely not going to be known because hackers know how to remain anonymous.

When a large number of Twitter accounts of celebrities were hacked in the past, if I'm not mistaken, it was that the hacker (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56429204) managed to enter the system by posing as an employee, and exploited some vulnerabilities, and thus hack the accounts. So it is possible that it is also a job from the inside, because only one employee with bad intentions is enough to do great damage.

Given India's attitude towards cryptocurrencies, I would not believe this, especially if it was published on Twitter - people should be much smarter.

Just like you and me, any twitter account is vulnerable to such attacks.

Hackers are everywhere, maybe they are really targeting certain high profile individuals or it could be that someone is colluding itself twitter or maybe twitter itself was compromised, or maybe poor security practice on whoever handles the PM account. There's a lot of reasons really and it's hard to pinpoint the exact one.

Hopefully though no one falls for this fake and scam bitcoin giveaways.

Misleading title. Account was compromised. PMO account tweeted it within an hour.

https://twitter.com/PMOIndia/status/1469786236990607361

I don't know how these hackers gained access to the accounts of people in the high ranking of the society. I remember it also happens to some of the celebrities Twitter accounts. This is something that needs to be focused on for all the social media platforms.
This kind of Tweets will somehow teach the people not to trust immediately especially If it happens like out of the blues without any previous Tweets about these.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it may be probably another “inside job” like what happened before to the Twitter account of Elon Musk and other well-known celebrities several months ago. Followers will easily be deceived as the  scam tweet comes from the original account himself and yes this is very bad.

The moment I saw the giveaway, I had a feeling it's a scam. True enough the URL in the image says it all.


Usually a verified account is hijacked and switched to some (controversial) influencer bearing the checkmark icon. For example, a verified community falls victim and the hacker changes the name + profile picture to be of Elon Musk. The most obvious giveaway would be the handle which is anything but @elonmusk himself.

This one is a little less common.

I thought it was an edited Telegram message in first look but after realized the account was hacked. However, just wondering how strong are hackers, it's quite dangerous hacking the Twitter account of the Prime Minister especially in a big country like India. Even it's possible to begin a war Lol. Not sure how many people fell into this trap due to hacking, but if I notice such a tweet from our Prime Minister then it will be shocking news for me. I won't believe they are giving away Bitcoin this way. Bitcoin giveaway should like El Salvador, so I would believe. This was a very old scam technic that the hacker applied here. If you aren't greedy, then you don't have to be worried.

That's a big amount bro (500 bitcoin) with currency conversion in India, of course different countries have different values,
my condolences.!

Hacking by irresponsible and unscrupulous people,
Twitter is just as important as any other crypto account.

I am a bounty hunter. Even for bounties here, the allocation of twitter is even more frequent and large, because it is difficult to get a reputation on twitter. For system vulnerabilities, either malwhare or quotes, there are insiders deliberately.
what is clear is that this is very detrimental and its impact on a trend that has changed 180 degrees.

I was also surprised until I read that it was a hacked account message. That being said, giveaway is pretty much always a scam. It's not great that scammers used his account for their purposes because this could play out as an additional negative factor when it comes to making the final decision about India's stance on cryptos. It's a great case for the narrative of cryptos being used by scammers for illegal financial activities.
As mentioned by Lucius, it's not the first case of a big account being hacked, so I think Twitter should really work on their security, ensuring that the inside jobs are difficult to perform, and the 'hacker' can be easily tracked.

Being a prime minister, you cannot be careless is any activity, specially with your social media accounts.



So the whole country intelligence agencies are unable to find the hacker after 12-16 hrs of the hack. That's another big question on the country security. Probably they need to hire a hacker to get trace of another hacker.

The ruling government of India has got different plans. Maybe this is one among the agenda to know about the people's mind on the usage of bitcoin as legal tender. This is the second time the account is getting hacked within two years of time. This is what makes me think it in such a way. The previous hack happened last September requesting funds in the form of cryptocurrency for covid-19 relief. Today once again the same account getting hacked is really questionable.

For being hacked for second time around it tells that their prime minister is not so techy and maybe he should stop or at least hire someone who know more better to do the job for him, since if he get hack for the same activity again then this might cause a huge financial damage to his citizen. Also hopefully those hackers will be traced since they are playing a dangerous game here.

I was trying to see the actual mechanics of the promoted scam giveaway, but since the site is down, I couldn’t find all that I was looking for. This time, instead of it being a doubler, the scammers were spirited to perform a x10 it seems (send me x and you’ll get x10 in return), at least judging by the (fake) comments on the link provided below.

What would be interesting to see is the BTC address used for the scam, and determine how much they managed to scam and from how many people. I don’t know if anybody has seen info on the used BTC address.

See: https://web.archive.org/web/20211211204938/https://india-official.blogspot.com/

This is something that should not be taken lightly by the government of India. Considering that the account of the prime minister was used in promoting and encouraging such, it is the responsibility of the authorities to take actions because their names are being associated with this accordingly. Moreover, given that the prime minister is a high profile individual in the society, his accounts must be secured at the utmost level possible not just to safety personal information but to not compromise public welfare as well.

ya.ya.yo!

Lets for a moment think that it was an inside job then what does was the purpose of this inside job ?
No one got scammed or something like that and neither India made crypto legal or illegal on this act. I am unable to find the possible purpose behind this action.

I think his twitter account has been hacked ???

These hackers must be tired of seeing the constant denial and ban statement from the prime minister they decided to have a little fun lol, it is very clear what their intentions were, to promote btc legalization using the minister twitter account, it is a crime to do such but it really sounds hilarious  ;D

If I'm not mistaken this is the second time the prime minister's twitter account in India has been hacked.
are they really so careless that they don't even consider good passwords for their social media accounts?

This will be a lure that is indeed misused by irresponsible people by providing information like this is actually not the benefit that bitcoin receives, but indirectly this makes the assumption that bitcoin is a tool to cheat by some people, especially for those who don't like bitcoin

The official account of the prime minister of India was hacked that's why this happened

something like this is not new, there have been several influential people in the world whose Twitter accounts were hacked and spread fake bitcoin giveaways

don't be easy to believe because the current bitcoin giveaway will never happen again

Yes, if you have read the previous responses here in this thread, it is confirmed that the prime minister’s account was hacked. Nothing has been updated yet as to who’s behind all of this and the reason for doing so, but most definitely it wasn’t the prime minister who started such, at least based on the references given.

ya.ya.yo!

In my prior post on this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5376524.msg58695381#msg58695381), I managed to find an archived version of the scam site used, which required following a link to yet another site that was unreachable. Looking around, I managed to get hold of the end scam webpage, that actually shows the procedure, some fake TXs shown for display, and the actual BTC address used by the scammers (if it is the only address used):

https://web.archive.org/web/20211211205727/https://india-transaction.blogspot.com/ (archived scam site)
https://twitter.com/supesuonna/status/1469945797185732610 (source)

The BTC scam address received a total of 12 TXs, rendering 0,08511347 BTC (a Little over 4K USD right now). By the way, they managed to generate a vanity address for show:
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1EVENTcWt7SFpFfeeq9cWd5zrk7g3FGXPW?page=1

Well, just reading the tweet one can easily feel that something is wrong with the account. A person in that high position will never be doing a giveaway, in the first place whether Bitcoin or fiat money not unless of course there can be recent announcements on adopting BTC just like what El Salvador did. We know that in India cryptocurrency remains to be in the shaky ground. The hackers can be the same group that also victimized other popular personalities in the past months with the intent to scam people. This is telling us how is the security in Twitter and why we should not believe everything we read, hear and see.

When you will see the title its like "Ohhh the Indian Government has mood swings because you saw them banning cryptocurrencies (not all) and now they are promoting it and organizing a giveaway" but when you dig and see the posts here you will see that it is hacked and I think its obvious just by seeing the tweet and that link below. I don't think as well that they will do this and will donate 500 BTC to random people.

Well, its quite unfortunate that there are still investors who are falling into this kind of scams. This are not new and it is being used by scammers for quite some time already and yet many are falling into it. This is what will happen if you are not knowledgeable in crypto especially in scams.

A scam. That's what the hacker did to several personalities after hacking their Twitter accounts. Posted some giveaways that would direct the readers to deposit to their bitcoin/ethereum address in the promise of a fixed amount of return.
I guess this won't let be passed by the prime minister of India after his account was hacked and used to a scam attempt.

This is just a common hacker but it's too serious for the other who doesn't really know what's going on. In fact, when someone posted like this, there always be a victim who thinks the posts came from the owner of the accounts that are being hacked. nevertheless, you should be able to tell the post was not from the owner since it is a form of the giveaway which are often used to scam and you should always remember that no matter who posted it, they are vulnerable to this kind of hack which was circulating Twitter accounts that belong to the people who have lots of followers.

So this means that it was not true...it is a scam trick and that it looks like scammers are targetting government officials' accounts now.

Anyway, A part of their plan is not to promote cryptocurrency in their place but have to stop it.

https://www.cnbctv18.com/cryptocurrency/cryptocurrency-bill-government-has-no-plans-to-boost-cryptos-in-india-11717342.htm

If the community knows about the issue of adopting crypto, they'll be thinking about the tweet if it is reliable or not, or a huge possibility of being a scam.

A mere blogspot that could generate 4K, not a bad haul for the scammer(s) involved.

I'm quite enthusiastic about reading this topic, and it seems that the account is also officially owned by the prime minister of India. Unfortunately it wasn't written by him, it was a warning to the prime minister that the Indian crypto community is very strong. They want to guide public opinion through the prime minister's twitter account.
Looks like the last news I heard India hasn't completely banned all crypto activities but they have allowed the digital currency they created.

Well, it's not that simple. Apparently, it was not a system of the Indian government that was hacked, but the account at an external service (in this case Twitter). This means that if Twitter does not provide the government or the IT specialists with any log data or the like, it is difficult to track down those behind the hack.

The Indian government doesn't like bitcoin so it would be weird and I wouldn't believe the Indian Prime Minister would buy 500 BTC and give it to people, that would be crazy the Indian government wouldn't do it at all, who the hell fell for this scam or Did believe this news? I know it's difficult because it was the prime minister's account. People in India who know their prime minister and government well know that this would be impossible.

As far as I have heard, the Indian govt announced to ban cryptocurrency soon after, they didn't allow people to involved in crypto publicly. The Indian government is not crypto-friendly at all. In fact, in a country with a large population, where per capita income is low and people live below the poverty line, adopting cryptocurrency is not an easy task. They are technologically backward so the government will not be able to bring all the people under the regulatory system, even if it wants to, which is why it is not possible to adopt crypto officially.

I think it would have been great news if the tweet had been true!! it would have been very positive news for Bitcoin.

Clearly it was fake, although posted from the official twitter account of Narendra Modi. Governments can't launch that kind of giveaway without proper rules, guidelines, previous announcements and equal participation chances for all the citizens of the country. After all, public funds are being used, that is everyone's money (at least in theory).

Anyone could easily spot the difference between this fake giveaway and the legit giveaway promoted by el salvadorean government which paid 30$ in bitcoin to every citizens early this year.

I heard it over BBC news channels that the prime minister Twitter account was slightly hacked and this tweet about bitcoin adoption or
bitcoin giveaways was tweeted. I should say that, this news shouldn't be given any consideration and should be neglected as it is not true.

I was actually worried about such thing! Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general is a hot topic in India right now and a draft bill is under consideration of the parliamentary committee. There are a lot of speculations ongoing at this moment and various media houses are posting both positive and negative news on this matter.

These kind of hacking activities are actually bad for the situation. So I strongly condemn such hacking activities. These are making things negative in India. Not good considering the current situation.

You are right about how this "high power peoples" account should have the highest possible security and password standard and I am thinking the same thing for crypto exchanges too with more recent attacks on Bitmart and AscendEX because it is looking like an easy thing for them, the hackers these days to get into any account they want and take what the want.

Richness does not determine how secure a social account account is, the security is in education and how the social media account owner is practising safty and making its account secure. One thing I also know about this social media thing, they are vulnerable to attack as well. This has not been the first time this is happening. Also on YouTube, we have seen many celebrity YouTube account that was hacked. And also on other social media accounts.

What is most important is not the account that was hacked, it is people to have the kind of education that will not let them be scammed. Scammers and hackers will not think of two things most of the time than to use the hacked account to scam people in a fake giveaway, telling people to pay-2-to-get-4 type of scam in which the victim will pay and nothing will be given in return. This is what people should avoid and the most important.

It was the same way the Twitter account of the world's richest man – Elon Musk's account together with those of other notable figures were hacked some time ago too. These things happen and sometimes they leave room for suspicion that the account owners are in the know of what's happening. In some cases I see it as a way of account owners using that opportunity to express their thoughts, away from the office or position they hold in government. That's the way I feel on this one. However, it's the later part of that article as shared by @Charles-Tim here https://cointelegraph.com/news/indian-prime-minister-modi-s-hacked-twitter-account-attempts-btc-scam that makes it look like a scam. I think the public should be watchful and weary of that too.

i was amazed reading the photo shared , but disappointed after reading the lower part in which the account was hacked and surely the hacker/hackers are a crypto community members because their announcement is really encouraging if the hacking does not exposed earlier.

though the Indian Government still having strict policy towards crypto and it is impossible to just happened that adoption overnight.

but it is a Good read in the beginning  lol.

The title is quite misleading. The first time I read it, I thought it was all about promoting the giveaway of bitcoin, and turns out, it was all about the hacking incident, not really promoting, so I suggest you change the title to avoid confusing other readers as well. This is such a clickbait as the title isn't aligned to the overall content. However, it's still good to read about the incident that has happened.

Any of us is prone to hacking. It could be any of the people around the world as platforms have their own vulnerabilities that are taken advantage of the hackers to gain something from it.  But of course, most of the time, those people who have been hacked and are more prone to hacking are the ones that have a wide reach of audience, are well-known, and have a reputation to uphold. The reason behind is is that the hackers can easily get what they want the moment they infiltrate the security of the account. Just like what happened to the Prime Minister's Twitter account. Since he is a reputable person, people trust him giving the hacker/s the advantage to execute easily what they want such as scamming. Since this is already the 2nd time around that his account has been hacked, I think the security is quite weak. As servant leaders, their accounts should be well taken care of and should have high safety protocols. May this serve as a lesson to them.

As for the Twitter followers of any reputable personality, let's avoid being a victim to such events by double-checking first whether the announcement is true or not. Avoid giving any personal information no matter how famous the person asking you is. Don't be easily fooled and always stay vigilant. Once you lose your funds, there's a little to no more chance to recover it so always be on your guard.

It's not the first time when users get scammed because someone hacked Twitter accounts of prominent people.
Everyone who thinks that bitcoins (and other coins) can be received so easily, should really reconsider their presence in crypto as this kind of silly approach may not end well for them one day.

Omg, it's another hack that took place perhaps from the unclear and changing regulations for bitcoin as a concept that lacks continuity. In fact, India is getting draconian with regulations related to bitcoin and crypto in recent times. I think it is also a "reminder" to the prime minister of India although I am not impressed with the hacked versions. Lol
Mr. Modi has probably never been in such a rush with a bitcoin-related gift - Giveaway . ;D

Yes we really not to be quick after getting a social comments cause the account could be hacked before that .Here we have faced same thing that his account hacked and after that we have seen a tweet so we need to more careful on that and also try to get the news from different source if it correct we can surely get it on other site as well .However we don't get any others source that he really said it so it's not good for us to become excited .I hope the government will think more and make strategy to switch it properly on the country .I didn't shock much after getting this news cause i knew it could be happen something like this .So i wanna suggest you to research and being updated always with the news what we get .

This was another one attempt to hack the official Twitter account of renowned world leaders and put up some crypto related stuff and this hack was done when there are uncertainties about the regulations of crypto industry in India.The government has yet to finalize and present the bill in the current parliament session and this hack was done during that.

This was bad attempt according to me as the tweet says legal tender for bitcoin but the government has previously said they will not make it legal tender like El Salvador and will come up some new approach or ban some private cryptos with partial regulations so this tweet doesn't make any sense to me at all.

But still there are so many users in India that want Government to take positive action for the regulations but the account was restored immediately after that and no scam was done according to me through this as hackers might want to them have nice decision in favour of bitcoin  ;D

If you're Indian and you actually believed that,,, then well,,, you do not know your country like I do  :P

Anyway, this Twitter getting hacked for Bitcoin scams is getting really old. And strangely enough,,, people still fall for them. And to think that if you are on Twitter it means probably you are educated and middle class.

I guess there is no education for greed :)

That is totally right. Public personalities, especially agents of the public administration have to be extremelly careful with their social media accounts, because it is an official mean or channel of communication of the government, due to the verification seal guaranteed by the platform.

The informations posted on that profile will surely be taken into consideration by the most uneducated and naive citizens, doesn't matter how insane they are, just like this one.

I could say it was an accident if the account had been hacked once, but since it is the second time it makes me think the responsible one for the social platforms is neglecting the security protocols of his duty. That is unacceptable!

This seems to be a joke, just like the Indian Prime Minister went to the Ganges. I don't know if he is worried about the virus in the Ganges

Well, I was not surprised. I believe that those who were here around last year when we experienced the Twitter hack that led to a lot of celebrities account posting all these kind of rubbish scam on their Twitter page, people who are here around that time wouldn’t be too fast to believe such news when they see it on Twitter. Because, they know very well what hackers are able to do. The last time they were able to hack lots of celebrities account which even included Barack Obama,and a lot of other celebrities more than I can count. And they used these accounts to post this same links and convinced some people to make transaction to their address.

I think they almost got $300,000 from that. But the good thing is that they were caught, so I don’t know about this one if they are really going to be caught as well. And I also hope that people never fell for it.

The text written in the tweet can be considered as a joke but the hacking of a prime minister's Twitter account is no joke at all.

By the way, one thing is for sure that hackers were someone whom knew about crypto or wanted to make crypto legal in India.

They had internal access IIRC. Hacking one account was no less or more difficult than hacking another.

This is a bigger problem than just stealing Bitcoins, because what happens if the twitter account of a public official, like Trump (who was active at the time) gets hacked. How can international markets be effected? What about foreign policy?

I've seen negative stories about Bitcoin attached to the twitter hacks, but this is more about Twitter having poor security.

It is good news that the Indian prime minister announced bitcoin as a legal tender in India. India is a big country regarding population and land facts.This announcement will give projection & encouragement to the Bitcoin & cryptocurrency users in India.This is a very good step taken by Narendra Modi. Overall it will go in the interest & favor of the Bitcoin family. But is surprising that the Indian Prime minister's Twitter account was hacked. It shows low security on the account of the Prime Minister.

You are getting it wrong. The Prime Minister Twitter account was hacked, the hackers were the ones that took it to the Prime Minister Twitter account that 'India is making bitcoin a legal tender', not the Prime Minister himself. So, it was actually not true but just a possible means to scam.

This is a common thing and has been done to several big figures or artists who have many followers. Hackers took advantage of the opportunity to manipulate the price of bitcoin with tweets made. But when twitter is known to be hacked, it will have a bad impact on bitcoin prices. Currently the price of bitcoin is unstable and crashes again.