Unidentified hackers broke into the Twitter accounts of technology moguls, politicians, celebrities and major companies in an apparent

Washington: Unidentified hackers broke into the Twitter accounts of technology moguls, politicians, celebrities and major companies in an apparent Bitcoin scam.

It included bogus tweets from former President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg and a number of tech billionaires including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Barack ObamaCelebrities Kanye West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, were also hacked. The fake tweets offered to send USD 2,000 for every USD 1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address.

There is no evidence that the owners of these accounts were targeted themselves.

The Biden campaign, said that Twitter's integrity team locked down the account within a few minutes of the breach and removed the related tweet.

Obama's office had no immediate comment. The FBI said it was aware of Twitter's security breach, but declined further comment.

The security problem was severe enough for Twitter to warn that many of its more than 166 million daily users might be unable to tweet or reset their passwords while the company tried to lock things down.

TwitterThe Bitcoin account mentioned in the fake tweets appears 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. At some point during the day, roughly half that sum in bitcoin was withdrawn from the account.

Bezos, Gates and Musk are among the 10 richest people in the world, with tens of millions of followers on Twitter. The three men are worth a combined 362 billion, according to the latest calculations by Forbes magazine.

This is hardly the first time hackers have created mischief on Twitter.