The tweets followed the sharing of malicious links by a number of cryptocurrency companies; the website hosting the links was taken down shortly after the tweets were posted.[14] While such "double your bitcoin" scams have been common on Twitter before, this is the first major instance of them being used with high profile accounts.[2] Security experts believe that the perpetrators ran the scam as a "smash and grab" operation: knowing that the intrusion into the accounts would be closed quickly, the perpetrators likely planned that only a small fraction of the millions that follow these accounts needed to fall for the scam in that short time to make quick money from it.[2] Multiple bitcoin wallets had been listed at these websites; the first one observed had received more than US$118,000 in bitcoin and had about US$61,000 removed from it, while a second had amounts in only the thousands of dollars as Twitter took steps to halt the postings.