Some of the world’s richest and most powerful people have been targeted by an online hacking scam.
Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden were all hit with a similar apparent breach of security.
All of their Twitter accounts posted messages urging people to send Bitcoins – a kind of cryptocurrency – to the same address.
The address linked to the scam appears to have received more than 11.3 BTC, or roughly £82,800 so far according to Coinbase, a cryptocurrency specialist website.
Microsoft founder Bill Gate’s account posted: “Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time.
“I am doubling all payments sent to my BTC address for the next 30 minutes. You send $1,000, I will send you back $2,000.”
Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO and the richest person in the world, wrote: “I have decided to give back to my community.
“All Bitcoin sent to my address below will be sent back doubled. I am only doing a maximum of $50,000,000.”
Other people targeted in the apparent scam include Kanye West, Apple and Uber.
Many of the posts have now been deleted after they were published on Wednesday evening.
It is not yet clear how the hackers gained access to so many accounts at the same time, especially high-profile accounts that have extra security measures in place.
A spokesperson for Twitter said the company was looking into the issue.
“Like many others, our @Uber account was hit by a scammer today,” the company tweeted.
“The tweet has been deleted and we’re working directly with @Twitter to figure out what happened.”
A spokesperson for Gates said the hack “appears to be part of a larger issue Twitter is facing”.
It came as Twitter appeared to suffer a global outage, with users reporting issues with the social media site in the hours after multiple celebrities were hacked.
Initially, there were reports that verified accounts were not able to tweet.
Downdetector.com has been receiving reports of problems since around 10pm.
Forty-two percent are on the IOS app, 34 percent on the website and 22 on the Android app.
Daily Mirror online