ESPN NBA reporter Adrian Wojnarowski’s X account hacked to post an NFT scam

People who still use NBA Top Shot were the primary targets of a scam tweet posted to ESPN reporter Adrian Wojnarowski’s account on X Saturday evening at about 6:30PM ET. The tweet referred to NBA Top Shot as a “popular” NFT platform, despite the fact that current activity levels are a tiny fraction of what we saw during its peak, and falsely claimed a “free NFT pack is available to all customers.”

The tweet linked visitors to a scam version of the NBA Top Shot website (the link went to a .org address instead of the official site’s .com URL) that could attempt to drain assets from people who give it access to their crypto wallets. About a half hour later, the official Top Shot account posted, saying, “There is NO Free Airdrop happening on NBA Top Shot at this time, Please be careful and always double check links.”

The post was eventually pulled from Wojnarowski’s account after being live for nearly an hour. Because of his reputation for breaking news tweets, many NBA fans have alerts turned on for his posts and could have had account information stolen if they clicked the fraudulent link.

A number of high-profile Twitter / X accounts continue to get compromised. Wojnarowski’s recent NBA news posts have also been syndicated on Threads, however that account was not used for the scam.

However, the latest NBA Top Shot stats from tracking site Cryptoslam.io only show about 8,100 unique sellers and 5,550 unique buyers for the month of January, down from the peak of more than 399,000 buyers in March 2021, so it’s doubtful there are very many people left using it to get scammed by this kind of post.