As Twitter was working to resolve the situation on July 15, Vice was contacted by at least four individuals claiming to be part of the scam and presented the website with screenshots showing that they had been able to gain access to a Twitter administrative tool, also known as an "agent tool", that allowed them to change various account-level settings of some of the compromised accounts, including confirmation emails for the account. This allowed them to set email addresses which any other user, with access to that email account, could initiate a password reset and post the tweets. These hackers told Vice that they had paid insiders at Twitter to get access to the administrative tool to be able to pull this off.
