London: Tesla chief executive officer Elon Musk's popularity has been abused by scammers to fleece Twitter users after hacking popular accounts.
US publisher Pantheon Books, film distributor Pathe UK and British fashion retailer Matalan were among those whose accounts were taken over by scam artists, the BBC reported.
The hackers used the Tesla CEO's name and likeness to ask for Bitcoin - a cryptocurrency - by promoting an ad on Twitter.
The tweet asked users to give away a small amount of Bitcoin to supposedly receive more.
Several other verified accounts, which were also hacked, appear in the tweet's comments to claim that they have received Bitcoin from Musk.
To make the accounts appear legitimate, the scammers used accounts with Twitter's own verification mark.
Clicking on any of the links in the scam guides users to a page where they are urged to send anywhere from 0.1-one Bitcoin to the scammers - with the promise that they would receive one-10 Bitcoin as a reward, the report said.
But the victims do not receive any Bitcoin after sending money to the scammers.
The scam is made to seem more trustworthy as various other compromised accounts reply to the tweet claiming that it works.
The tweets have since been deleted with many accounts recovered, though some were left blank while waiting for their owners to re-enter their name and profile picture, the report said.
The Pathe UK Twitter account was hacked this morning by an unknown third party. A series of unauthorised tweets were sent for which we apologise. The issue has now been resolved and we have taken back control of our account.
— Pathé UK (@patheuk) November 5, 2018
A Twitter spokesperson told the BBC it "doesn't comment on individual accounts for privacy and security reasons".
An early form of the scam appeared in March. Again, in August, one impersonator broke into Musk's official account with a fake lookalike verified account, promising his followers free Bitcoin and ethereum cryptocurrencies.
In fact, the scam became so frequent on the social network that the Tesla chief was briefly blocked from his own Twitter account after he parodied the scam by sending a tweet asking: "Wanna buy some Bitcoin?", the BBC report said.