New Delhi, Sep 11 (IANS): The X (formerly Twitter) account of Vitalik Buterin, the Russia-based co-founder of the world's second-largest cryptocurrency Ethereum, has been hijacked by a hacker, who went on to steal $6,91,000 from users who clicked on a corrupted link posted to his feed. 

According to Decrypt, the hack was first discovered last week when a post appeared on Buterin's post announcing the release of a set of commemorative non-fungible tokens (NFTs) from software provider Consensys.

The malicious link prompted many of his 4.9 million followers to connect their wallets to mint the NFT, but in reality, it simply created a vacuum for the hacker to steal their money.

While users were quick to raise the alarm about the fake link, Buterin's father (Dmitriy "Dima" Buterin) was the first to confirm that his son's account had been compromised.

"Disregard this post, apparently Vitalik has been hacked. He is working on restoring access," he posted on X.

Moreover, the report said that the post has since been removed, but several victims have reported losing access to funds in their wallets. The hacker appeared to have made off with more than $147,000 within an hour, but that quickly increased to $691,000, according to blockchain investigator @ZachXBT.

Since the hack was first reported, Buterin has not yet commented publicly on the incident.

As per @ZachXPT, the hacker subsequently sent a stolen NFT to Buterin, the report mentioned.

However, it is unknown how many users were affected by this incident.

In June, the X account of OpenAI's Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati was hacked in order to promote a fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme.

Later, her account started promoting a new cryptocurrency called "$OPENAI" that was allegedly "driven by artificial intelligence-based language models".

In the unauthorised tweets, Murati's followers were encouraged to send money to an Ethereum digital wallet address in order to receive free "airdropped" coins.

The tweets were quickly deleted before reappearing minutes later with slightly altered wording.