Threat actors take over Beeple's Twitter account to scam over $400,000

Updated on: 23 May 2022

Jurgita Lapienytė
Chief Editor

Scammers took over Beeple's Twitter account to direct users to a fake Louis Vuitton site. Crooks netted over $70,000 before Beeple regained control of his account.

American artist Mike Winkelmann (Beeple) put a spotlight on non-fungible tokens (NFTs) after selling his artwork for $69 million. It was the first-ever sale by a major auction house (Christie's) of a piece of art that does not exist in physical form. The work consists of 5,000 individual images, made one per day over thirteen years.

With over 670,000 followers on Twitter, he recently fell victim to criminals who hacked his account to benefit from the artist's vast circle of supporters.

"ugh we'll that was fun way to wake up. Twitter was hacked but we have control now. Huge thanks to @garyvee 'a team for quick help!!!!" Winkelmann tweeted on Sunday.

Crooks used the compromised account to distribute phishing links to his followers. The stage tweet read: "Been working on this with LV for a long time behind the scenes. 1000 unique pieces… official raffle below."

According to Harry Denley, security analyst of MetaMask, two phishing links were active for more than five hours, and threat actors managed to scam over $430,000, despite multiple warnings of the scam by NFT influencers and researchers on Twitter.

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The scammers were likely to capitalize on a recent Louis Vuitton and Beeple collaboration. Louis Vuitton launched Louis The Game to celebrate its bicentennial birthday, featuring 30 NFTs by Beeple embedded as rewards for players.

"And as side note, there will never be a SURPRISE MINT I mention one time in one place starting at 6am Sunday morning," Beeple tweeted.