On Thursday, Twitter reported that the personal website account of Prime Minister Narendra Modi was hacked after tweets called on followers to donate to the national relief fund through cryptocurrency. The micro blogging site said it knew about the operation with PM Modi 's website account and added it had taken steps to secure it. "We are aware of this incident and have taken steps to secure the compromised account. We are actively investigating the situation. We are not aware of any additional accounts being affected at this time," said a Twitter spokesperson.
PM Modi’s office has not yet commented about the tweets posted on the account @narendramodi_in. The account is the official Twitter handle for Modi's personal website and the Narendra Modi mobile app, with over 2.5 million followers. Meanwhile, there are over 61 million followers of PM Modi's personal Twitter account, which was not affected by the hack. The tweets, now deleted, asked followers to donate via crypto-currency to the PM National Relief Fund. The incident comes after many prominent personalities' Twitter accounts were hacked in July. In what had been an obvious Bitcoin scam, hackers had hacked into the Twitter accounts of technology companies, lawmakers, celebrities and major firms.
The ploy included fake tweets from former President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg and other tech billionaires including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Besides this, there were also violations of accounts of celebrities Kanye West and his wife Kim Kardashian West. The fake tweets promised to send $2,000 to an anonymous Bitcoin address for every $1,000 sent to. The scam appeared to occur in two stages, in which the scammers posted identical Bitcoin-scamming tweets from both Gates' and Musk's accounts for the second time after their first tweets were removed.