Microsoft India's X (formerly Twitter)'s account falls for crypto scams

Microsoft India became the latest addition to the laundry list of X (formerly Twitter) accounts that fall for crypto scams. The Indian branch of the Redmond tech giant has a gold tick on the platform, meaning that X verifies it as an official organization.

The @MicrosoftIndia handle seems to impersonate Roaring Kitty from the famed stock trader Keith Gill, who recently made a comeback a few weeks back.

The scammers then take advantage of the momentum to share the link in replies to the original @TheRoaringKitty tweets, which, once clicked, leads you to an unverified website that “pre-sells” fake GameStop (GME) crypto. The price goes as minimum as 0.1 ETH (Ethereum), which is equal to around USD$ 377.

@MicrosoftIndia has over 211K followers, and now, it’s even changed its name to just a dot and deleted its profile picture as well as the account’s header. It also retweets some of the videos from @TheRoaringKitty’s account that were shared a few weeks ago. The Redmond tech giant has yet to state as tweets have been up for a good few hours.

Earlier this week, GME’s shares surged after Roaring Kitty’s screenshot post on Reddit, purportedly revealing his $175 million position in GameStop’s stock, including shares and options. It reached 40.09 USD/share on Monday, June 3, 2024, but at the time of Kitty’s comeback in May, it even reached as high as USD 48.75.

And that’s not the only crypto-related scams that have been present on X in the past months. For years, accounts pretending to be Elon Musk have been saying that the billionaire is giving away bitcoins. It then leads to a link that once clicked, it takes your personal information if you fill in the blank.