Matthew Perry’s official Twitter account was hijacked by scammers this week who attempted to solicit donations from well-meaning fans of the much-loved late actor.

The post, which has since been removed from Perry’s Twitter account, asked for cryptocurrency donations “to support our mission in battling addiction.”

The tweet claimed to be signed by “The Matthew Perry Foundation”, a genuine fund set up after the actor’s death to fight for better addiction treatment.

However, in a tweet, the official Matthew Perry Foundation warned that the post was bogus and told followers not to share the fraudulent plea via social media, and reminded them to only donate via the official site at matthewperryfoundation.org.

Quite how the account of Perry, famous for his role of Chandler Bing in the TV sitcom “Friends”, managed to be hijacked by scammers remains something of a mystery.  Possibilities include:

• that someone who now has control over the account was phished
• that someone had the account’s password stolen by malware
• that Perry had made the mistake while alive of reusing the same password on his Twitter account as elsewhere on the net (and the shared password has been exposed through a data breach). Equally it’s possible that someone else with access to Perry’s account had made the mistake.

The social media accounts of celebrities are certainly an attractive playground for scammers.  Matthew Perry’s Twitter account, for instance, is still followed by more than 1.5 million people.

Social media managers for celebrities, living or dead, should follow best practices for securing accounts, such as using strong, unique passwords and enabling multi-factor authentication.

54-year-old Perry passed away at his home in Los Angeles in October 2023, after a well-documented struggle with addiction.