Crypto scammers at present impersonated a Hong Kong official on X, previously Twitter, and pumped and dumped a fraudulent meme coin that they pushed as an “official” Hong Kong token referred to as “KONG.”
An account on X masquerading as Chief Government John Lee claimed that the “Nationwide Hong Kong Coin” was going to make its debut on Solana. The now-deleted publish mentioned the supposed Hong Kong token marked “a brand new period in digital innovation and financial progress,” and would “remodel the way forward for finance.”
On Fb, Lee warned this was “intentionally fraudulent”—and vowed these initiating him can be “severely reprimanded.”
These warnings, nevertheless, apparently went unheeded by a couple of keen meme coin merchants. The token launched within the early afternoon hours in Hong Kong, reaching a peak market cap of simply over $320,000 inside minutes of its launch, in line with knowledge from Dexscreener. The value of the KONG token then collapsed by 96% seconds later because the token’s deployer cashed out, promoting roughly $24,000 price of the token in a single clip.
“The incident has been referred to the police for follow-up investigation. I counsel the general public to watch out to hunt proof, confirm authenticity, and guard towards being deceived,” Lee mentioned in his Fb publish.
Worryingly, the bogus Hong Kong chief govt X account had greater than 40,000 followers and a grey checkmark, which denotes it belongs to a verified authorities official.
That is the most recent in a protracted line of scams concentrating on world leaders, and trying to con crypto lovers into investing in pretend meme cash.
Simply final month, fraudsters impersonating Mohammed bin Salman prompted the “Official Saudi Arabia Memecoin.”
This got here after an account belonging to the Saudi Regulation Convention was hacked, and edited to make it seem to be it belonged to the crown prince.
One other incident in February noticed a scammer fake to be Bermuda’s premier David Burt, with an X publish unveiling the “Bermuda Nationwide Coin.”
That got here from an account that had 4 instances as many followers as the true Burt. And similar to the pretend Hong Kong chief govt account, it had a grey checkmark.
Such bulletins have develop into more and more tough for crypto lovers to navigate, as a few of them have been real.
The president of the Central African Republic not too long ago used X to launch the $CAR meme coin, and described it as an “experiment” designed to assist nationwide improvement and put the nation on the world stage.
Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, is at present dealing with an investigation after he posted in regards to the Libra meme coin on X, solely to delete it hours later.
Edited by Stacy Elliott.
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