Within 4 hours, an official social media account belonging to the British Army was hacked and promoted a collection of non-fungible tokens (NFT) and counterfeit cryptocurrencies.
It is understood that the official Twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts were controlled by scammers on July 4 from 9pm Malaysian time until 1am the next day.
The incident was noticed by the Ministry of Defense (MOD) of the United Kingdom (UK) which immediately started an investigation after several Twitter users displayed screenshots of hacked accounts.
Looking at some of those screenshots, the British Army’s official Twitter is seen promoting 2 fraudulent derivatives of The Possessed and BAPESCLAN NFT collections.
British Army Twitter account @BritishArmy appears to have been hacked pic.twitter.com/41HPtSeln1
- OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) July 3, 2022
The hacked account of the scammer was also seen pinning a fake post about The Possessed collection, which may be a phishing technique that would steal money from users ’crypto wallets.
The @BritishArmy has been compromised and is currently being used to shill NFTs.
Previous archive of the Twitter profile: https://t.co/dQmlxlY5l8 pic.twitter.com/gifpsOy000
-vx-underground (@vxunderground) July 3, 2022
Then one of the creators of the collection, Tom Watson, was seen warning about the false information and asked his followers to make a report on the account.
On the YouTube site, it has rebranded the account to resemble investment firm ARK Invest and posted a video of an interview between Elon Musk and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.
the British Army's YouTube page, still under the control of some crypto scammers, is running 4 consecutive livestreams with approx 19,000 people watching as we speak. would be interesting if any of them who fall for the scam could have grounds to sue the Army pic.twitter.com/oVWrDsXKZ1
- Monsieur Rules (@wariotifo) July 3, 2022
The videos were seen displaying QR codes for viewers to send cryptocurrencies, which the recipient claimed would get double returns, in addition to promoting the scam of issuing other cryptocurrencies via QR codes.
So far it is still unknown who is the mastermind behind the hacking or scammer who attacked the official account of the British Army.
Once back in control, the British Army has deleted all the scams displayed in addition to apologizing to users for the unusual incident.
