I've been seeing similar scams in Elon's replies, they just copy his profile picture and name and reply with a different account. You might have seen that one

These have been going on for years and Twitter has never managed to put a stop to them. What happen on Wednesday seemed an inevitable escalation.

It doesn't help that Twitter's own CEO legitimises and normalises "twitter giveaway bonanza" tweets with his own Square Cash giveaways.

I am used to spotting cryptocurrency scams. The tweet I saw was from his official account, days before the "Wednesday hack".

Elon Musk's account getting hacked or promoting a cryptocurrency scam would have made news immediately, so I think you are mistaken.

I don't think that's been reported anywhere, could you link to an archive or something?

I couldn't find any screenshots, archive.org link, or browser history for the tweet I saw. So, unfortunately I have no evidence that the scam tweets started before Wednesday. We'll see what Twitter finds.

Twitter is not incentivized to find anything and make it public if that makes matters look even worse than they already are.

The tweets didn't come from his handle. They were using the same image and name but what really caught my attention was that those accounts had a blue verified badge.

Yep, the newest strategy of the Twitter crypto scammers is to hack verified accounts of lesser-known users, then change the account name and profile picture to that of the user they wish to imitate.

Wait a minute, you can change the name of a verified account without going through verification again?

Yep, @Noahpinion changes his like every week.