Briefly
- Official Instagram accounts for Michael Jackson, Adele, and Future had been apparently hijacked to advertise a meme coin.
- The token, named after a clothes model and report label connected to Future, reached a close to $900K market cap earlier than plummeting.
- The scammer made off with round $49,000 after dumping nearly all of the tokens.
The Instagram accounts of famous person musicians Adele, Future, Tyla, and the late Michael Jackson had been hacked to advertise an unaffiliated Solana meme coin late Thursday.
The hacker used the celebrities’ pages to share now deleted posts of what seems to be an AI rendering of Future, holding an outsized coin inscribed “FREEBANDZ”—the identify of a report label and clothes line linked to the rapper, in addition to the Solana meme coin promoted within the posts.
The rapper’s account is now not lively on Instagram, and the cryptocurrency doesn’t seem to really be linked to Future or his attire model.
Created on in style Solana token launchpad Pump.enjoyable, the meme coin briefly ran to an all-time excessive market cap simply shy of $900,000 earlier than collapsing by practically 98%, to $20,000.
Following the run-up, the token’s creator—a Solana handle ending in “zcmPHn”—dumped 700 million tokens, or 70% of the overall provide in a single transaction, sending the value crashing down within the course of.
The rug-puller, seemingly linked to whoever hijacked the celebrities’ Instagram accounts, walked away with 251.57 SOL, or greater than $49,000 at in the present day’s Solana value.
Whereas the posts have been deleted, not one of the celebrities that had been compromised in Thursday’s hack have made public statements on Instagram or X as of Friday afternoon.
Hacking in style social media accounts to advertise meme cash and different crypto scams isn’t a brand new phenomenon.
Earlier this 12 months, the UFC’s official Instagram account was hacked, resulting in $1.4 million in losses for crypto customers. And the creator of the character “Chill Man” had his account stolen a number of instances after a Solana meme coin primarily based on the viral TikTok craze blew as much as a $650 million market cap.
Even Barack Obama and Elon Musk have seen their social media accounts swiped and misused in a malicious crypto scheme. Malicious actors sometimes search to make use of outstanding social media accounts to pump the worth of a coin earlier than promoting and crashing the value—a basic pump-and-dump scheme.
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