July 16, 2020: In a shocking news, the Twitter accounts of major companies and individuals have been compromised in one of the most widespread and confounding hacks the platform has ever seen, all in service of promoting a bitcoin scam that appears to be earning its creator quite a bit of money. 

Billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are among many prominent US figures targeted by hackers on Twitter in an apparent Bitcoin scam  in which all the accounts posted the following tweet: “Feeling grateful doubling all payments sent to my BTC address! You send $1,000, I send back $2,000! Only doing this for the next 30 minutes.”

The official accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Kanye West also requested donations in the cryptocurrency.

"Everyone is asking me to give back," a tweet from Mr Gates' account said. "You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000."

The Biden campaign told AFP that Twitter locked down the hacked account quickly and removed the bogus tweet.

It appeared that Twitter had disabled the ability to tweet from validated accounts, those with the official blue checkmarks.

The account of US President Donald Trump, which has more than 83 million followers, was not hacked.

"You may be unable to Tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident," Twitter's support team said in a post.

"This is a SCAM, DO NOT participate!" Gemini cryptocurrency exchange co-founder Cameron Winklevoss warned from his official account on Twitter.

"This is the same attack/takeover that other major crypto twitter accounts are experiencing. Be vigilant!" 

The site Blockchain.com, which monitors transactions made in cryptocurrencies, said a total of 12.58 bitcoins, worth almost $116,000, had been sent to the email addresses mentioned in the fraudulent tweets.

Rachel Tobac of cyber-security firm Social Proof Security theorized that hackers got control of a Twitter employee's administrative access to "take over a prominent account and tweet on their behalf."