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The Sandbox CEOโ€™s Twitter was hacked, used to promote alleged โ€˜airdropโ€™ scam

May 26, 2023No Comments


Arthur Madrid, co-founder and CEO of the Metaverse project The Sandbox, was the victim of a Twitter account hack on May 26, according to a post from Madrid that was apparently made after he recovered the account. The attacker allegedly used the Madrid account to promote a fake "airdrop" phishing scam.

In the Madrid post, he warned users of The Sandbox to "never click on any links that promote Airdrop or URLs and look like SCAMMY, and not 100% use our own unique URL/domain name: http:/ /sandbox.game".

Four hours before the Madrid post, The Sandbox's official Twitter account also warned that a scammer had taken control of the account and was promoting "a scam/phishing link for a fake airdrop of SAND tokens."

The post included a screenshot of the alleged fraudulent post, which advertised a SAND token airdrop and encouraged users to "check eligibility and claim on site", referring users to a website with a different URL than the official.

The Sandbox team stated that they were "working to shut down the site and fix it as soon as possible."

As of 8:26pm UTC, the alleged scam site appears to have been removed, as it now produces a 404 error.

Related: Six tools used by hackers to steal cryptocurrency: how to protect wallets

Phishing attacks have become a frequent problem in the crypto community. On May 19, a scam as a service called โ€œInferno Drainerโ€ was reported. discovered to be operating on Telegram, recruiting website builders to create hundreds of these phishing scam sites. When it was discovered, it had allegedly stolen nearly $6 million from users.

On April 15, the cybersecurity firm Kaspersky reported that these types of attacks increased by 40% in 2022 compared to the previous year.