The official X account of Ahmadu Fintiri, Adamawa State Governor, was hacked on Friday night.

As of Saturday morning when FIJ learnt of the incident, the hackers were still in charge of the account, which they were using to promote cryptocurrency.

One of the earliest promotional posts by the hackers was shared at 10:51 pm and captioned, “Pop the champagne — $XRP is finally SEC-free! #XRP.”

The featured image of a link — take-ripple-xrp.net — shared along with the post contains the following words, “RIPPLE”, “JOIN NOW!” “Giveaway +5000 XRP”, “Giveaway+ 10 000 XRP” and “Huge giveaway by Brad Garlinghouse”.

Since that time, the page has put out more than 50 posts bearing similar content promoting cryptocurrency.

FIJ found that before the take over, Governor Fintiri still issued an official update on a meeting he had with Christopher Musa, the Chief of Defence Staff, at his office on Friday.

The governor’s post was shared at 8:09 pm, two hours before the account was hacked.

At the time of this report, the government had not recovered the hacked page, and no official statement had been issued yet.

In February, hackers took over the X account of Premium Times, a Nigerian online newspaper, in the same manner to promote this XRP cryptocurrency.

It took the online news platform weeks to recover the account. (Foundation for Investigative Journalism)