Boy, there is so much irony in this story that it’s hard to know where to begin.
John McAfee – Mr. cyber-security and Bitcoin advocate – has fallen victim to Twitter hackers who hijacked his account in what looks like a crypto pump-and-dump scheme.
Here are some of the “suspicious” tweets:
Apparently, those tweets led to some notable price action in the “recommended” coins. McAfee posted an “urgent” message to his followers on Wednesday:
Urgent: My account was hacked. Twitter has been notified. The coin of the day tweet was not me. As you all know… I am not doing a coin of the day anymore!!!!
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) December 27, 2017
I have NEVER, at ANY time predicted XVG would reach a price of $15. The Oracle Times did not bother to even confirm it was a fake McAfee account: this is why we have check marks.
https://t.co/U5CyFWa6Gv pic.twitter.com/e6aOSZdU0z— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) December 27, 2017
McAfee told the BBC that he activated Twitter’s two-factor authentication option but that didn’t help because his phone was maybe hacked too. He shared a screengrab which hilariously shows that he’s got a picture of himself as his wallpaper:
“The first indication that I had been hacked was turning on my cell phone and seeing the attached image,” he said.
As Bloomberg notes, Electroneum, Reddcoin, Burst, Digibyte and Humaniq “saw volatility, with some prices rising more than 100% following McAfee’s ‘Coin of the day’ tweets before paring gains.”
“The tweets did not ‘sound’ like McAfee’s usual self,” cryptovest.com wrote this morning.
Right. Because if that were really John McAfee tweeting, he wouldn’t have said “LOAD THE FUCK UP ON IT.”
Rather, he would have said he’d “eat his own dick” if it didn’t go to half a million in three years…
Funny and sad simultaneously….