Updated on 25 Aug 26 by
Barry Carter
Poker Expert

Gambling and sports stars targeted in X phishing scam

Big names from the world of gambling and sports are being targeted in a series of social media hacks on X. Their accounts are being hacked via phishing scams and used to promote promises of cryptocurrency riches (which is almost certainly also another phishing scam).

The hackers are sending private DMs to the followers of these accounts in order to get access to further accounts. Afterwards, they are posting AI-generated images of the victims promoting a fake cryptocurrency advisor.

Professional poker player and ACR ambassador Ana Marquez, whom we recently interviewed, is one of the recent victims. The tweet below is fake and from the hackers and uses AI-generated images. The posts below are shared for awareness; please do not click any links in them:

Likewise, 2014 World Series of Poker Main Event champion Martin Jacobson has been targeted. Again, you can see below a quite convincing AI-generated image of him posing in front of a new car.

It is not just people from the world of gambling. Right now, quite specifically, people from the world of rugby have been targeted as well. No doubt, people from other niches have been targeted, and this is perhaps just one of the industries in which the hackers have had success. Below is one such example of a rugby player who has been targeted this month.

Sophisticated phishing scams

The way it appears that the hackers have been accessing these X accounts is if the people involved respond to a phishing attempt from another account that has been hacked. This writer has personally received a DM from both Jacobson and Marquez, asking for a quick vote in a poker podcast contest. When you do not respond, they send a follow-up message the next day.

If you follow the link, you will be taken to a voting platform where you can cast your vote by logging in to X. If you then put in your login details, the hackers will have access to your account details. At which point, they will DM all your followers with the same scam and post from your account.

This particular type of scam has been rife on X in the last year or two. In fact, veteran World Series of Poker commentator Norman Chad has completely lost access to his original X account from an almost identical scam. He no longer has access to his account, which had almost 58,000 followers, and has had to start again from fresh with a new one.

This time around, though, the scam seems slightly more sophisticated. It appears that the hackers have at least a little bit of understanding of the industry they are targeting (poker was mentioned in the phishing DMs) and the AI-generated images of those affected were actually quite convincing.

What to do if you get caught out

poker

Social media scams are getting more sophisticated

Unfortunately, this writer has had recent experience with stories like this. My own (award winning) X account was hacked earlier this month as I fell for a similar phishing scam.

In my case, as someone who posts a lot of content on X, I received an email saying one of the pictures I had shared had been flagged for copyright infringement, and that I would have my account suspended if I didn't appeal. Just like the scams above, I was taken to a login page that looked just like the X login page.

I was able to quickly reverse the damage done. It appears I was one of the lucky ones. A lot of people have been unable to reclaim their X account because the hackers have changed the account login email and 2FA credentials. It looked almost like that was going to be the fate for my own account, as my initial attempts with X kept running into AI customer services dead ends. But thankfully, persistence paid off.

If you find yourself in the same predicament and are able to regain access to your X account, your first action should be to change your password immediately. If you use the same password and email setup on another account, change the password for that too. Your second course of action should be to look at all the current active sessions on your X account and log all of them out. Here you would see if the scammer was logged in on another device in a different location. 

Third, see if your recovery information and two-factor authentication information is correct, as scammers could change that to access your account later. If you don't have two-factor authentication set up on your account, do so immediately.

Whether gamblers in particular have been targeted remains to be seen, but it does appear that a cryptocurrency-based scam that is one of the ways that the hackers are gaining access to the social media accounts. Cryptocurrency is, after all, an adjacent industry to the gambling industry.

At the very least, high-profile accounts have been targeted, which one would imagine are worth a lot more to would-be hackers. Perhaps most importantly, it appears that the scams are getting more convincing because of the sophistication of AI-generated content, so we have to be even more vigilant than we used to be,  

Barry Carter
Poker Expert

Barry Carter is the editor of PokerStrategy.com and the co-author of The Mental Game of Poker 1 & 2, Poker Satellite Strategy, PKO Poker Strategy, Endgame Poker Strategy, GTO Poker Simplified, Mystery Bounty Poker Strategy and Beyond GTO. In 2025, he won the Global Poker Awards for Best Book and Twitter Personality of the Year.