John McAfee Twitter Handle Hack Results in Pump and Dump of Multiple Coins

One of the most controversial characters in the soaring world of cryptocurrencies is John McAfee. The relation between the software security expert and the digital coins spiced up even more as hackers came into the picture recently, hacking the multi-millionaire’s Twitter account earlier today.

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A series of the tweets mentioning “coin of the day” was fired from Mr. McAfee’s account today. The tweets started with buying recommendations for Siacoin and then NXT. The tweets even recommended potential buyers to hoard coins like PTOY, BAT, and XRP.

The tone of the tweets clearly showed that it was not John McAfee who was tweeting those recommendations.

But unfortunately, the bots which were trading on Mr. McAfee’s recommendations are still active and they could not judge between the fake and real recommendations from his Twitter handle. This was clearly visible in the price movement of the recommended coins.

After the first tweet, Siacoin went up from 175 Sats to over 260 Sats in seconds. But dumping of the coins also started quickly and the price went down to 180 Sats. A similar fate was seen for NXT. The coin quickly went up from under 8000 Sats to over 9300 Sats, before dropping to previous levels.

Shortly after those rogue tweets, a tweet from Mr. McAfee’s account came out mentioning the hacking of the account and also discrediting all of the previous tweets.

Urgent: My account was hacked. Twitter has been notified. The coin of the day tweet was not me. As you all know… I am not doing a coin of the day anymore!!!!

— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) December 27, 2017

John McAfee and the crypto world

The name of John McAfee, who is best known for his infamous anti-virus software McAfee, start floating in the crypto community after he began publishing coin recommendations. The trading of many coins like Verge (XVG) and Reddcoin (RDD) was hugely influenced by his recommendations.

Verge (XVG) was worth $0.000019 at the beginning of 2017, but by the 20th December, it had hit $0.1637. Its market cap grew from $246,300 to $2.41 billion.

Though his recommendations were obviously not the only factor behind this massive growth, they surely played a large part.

Recently some Reddit users have been accusing McAfee of recommending coins for money, resulting in a pump and dump scenario.

A lot of fake John McAfee Twitter accounts have also surfaced, trying to deceive investors by falsely recommending coins.