NEW YORK: Several prominent Twitter accounts, including those of former US president Barack Obama, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, were hacked apparently to promote a Bitcoin scam.

The attackers posted tweets that appeared to promote a cryptocurrency scam. The fake tweets offered to send USD 2,000 for every USD 1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address.

Not just them, the account of former US vice-president Joe Biden, who is the current Democratic Party presidential candidate in the November election, was also hacked. Other accounts like Kanye West, Kim Kardashian West, Warren Buffett, Bezos and Mike Bloomberg, posted similar tweets soliciting donations via Bitcoin to their verified profiles on Wednesday, July 15.

Twitter believes to be a "coordinated social engineering attack".

"We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools," Twitter's support team said.

Bitcoin is a popular vehicle for this type of scam because once a victim sends money, the design of Bitcoin, with no institution in charge, makes it essentially impossible to recover the funds, a report said.

Twitter said that they have immediately locked down the affected accounts and removed Tweets posted by the attackers. The accounts of the compromised accounts have been locked. It said that the accounts will restore access to the original account owner only when we are certain we can do so securely.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, said in a post on Wednesday night that it was a “tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible that this happened. We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened."