Bitcoin.org Restored After Being 'Temporarily Disabled' Due to Giveaway Scam, Nearly $18,000 in BTC Sent

Bitcoin.org’s website has become the victim of a giveaway scam and gone dark early on Thursday. “This site can’t be reached,” reads the message on the website. The crypto community rang the bell on this scam and notified domain name registrar Namecheap, which had “temporarily disabled the domain.” Cobra, a pseudonymous entity or person who has been the site’s operator, said the site has indeed been compromised and may remain down for a few days as they look into how the hacker put up the scam modal on it. “Bitcoin.org hasn't been hacked, ever. And then we move to Cloudflare, and two months later we get hacked,” said Cobra in a now-deleted tweet. They further said that the actual server didn’t get any traffic either during the hack while noting that none of their accounts seem compromised. “Server is fine too,” they said, adding, “The attackers just seem to have exploited some flaw in the DNS.” Started in 2008, Bitcoin.org is the oldest education resource site regarding the leading cryptocurrency. On Thursday, the homepage screen of the website invited visitors to send money to bitcoin wallets to have them doubled. This double the money scheme was Bitcoin Foundation “giving back to the community,” said the message. According to the message, which contained a QR code for a wallet and its address, the first 10,000 users to send BTC would have their funds doubled. Some people may have fallen victim to the scam with no way to get around the message as other functionalities were limited at the time. The scam addresses received 0.4057 BTC worth $17,910 from 9 transactions, as of writing, according to Bitcoin blockchain explorer Blockchain.com. Like most of these 'double your crypto' type scams, the hacker may have dumped BTC into the wallet first to get people to start sending in their BTC. In early July, the site was also hit by a massive denial of service attack (DDoS), just days after the UK courts ordered the site to stop hosting the Bitcoin whitepaper over copyright infringement. As of now, the website is back up and running, but there hasn't been any indication that they have figured who or exactly how the hacker gained control over the website.