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The Twitter accounts of Kanye West, Kim Kardashian and Barack Obama were among those hacked in what appeared to be a major cryptocurrency scam.
Official accounts on the same social media platform, including those for Joe Biden, Apple, Uber and billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, were also targeted.
They were simultaneously hacked on Wednesday evening and a scammers’ message posted encouraging users to send 1,000 dollars (£794) to a Bitcoin address.
In return, users were promised that their money will be doubled and returned to them.
A post on Tesla CEO Mr Musk’s account read: “I’m feeling generous because of Covid-19. I’ll double any BTC payment sent to my BTC address for the next hour.”
The tweet asked for Bitcoin and promised to “double all payments” sent to an address.
This was the beginning of a wave of takeovers of high-profile Twitter accounts, including Apple, Uber, Amazon CEO Mr Bezos and Microsoft founder Mr Gates.
Most of the tweets were deleted within a number of minutes, but many had been retweeted thousands of times.
Twitter said it believed the incident was a “coordinated social engineering attack” that targeted some of its employees with access to internal systems and tools.
They were then used to take control of many high-profile and verified accounts and tweet from them, the social media firm said in statement.
The Bitcoin account mentioned in the fake tweets appeared to have been created on Wednesday. By the end of the day, it had received almost 12.9 bitcoins, an amount currently valued at slightly more than $114,000 (£90,000).
At some point during the day, roughly half that sum in bitcoin was withdrawn from the account.
The hacked messages were posted after several high-profile cryptocurrency companies’ Twitter accounts shared malicious links earlier on Wednesday.
Tyler Winklevoss, who founded cryptocurrency company Gemini alongside brother Cameron, tweeted earlier: “WARNING: Gemini’s twitter account, along with a number of other crypto twitter accounts, has been hacked. This has resulted in Gemini, Coinbase, Binance, and Coindesk, tweeting about a scam partnership with CryptoForHealth.
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