French football star Kylian Mbappe’s X (formerly Twitter) account was reportedly hacked on Thursday. The hacker launched a token named $MBAPPE and advertised it on the footballer’s account, which skyrocketed within minutes to a market cap of tens of millions.
Mbappe, who recently joined Real Madrid CF, has a huge following of 14.4 million X users. The fresh hacking incident continues a recent trend of celebrities being targeted to advertise crypto pump and dump scams.
Mbappe’s meme coin rug pull
The French football star’s X account got compromised, after which the hacker posted a contract from a crypto coin that he had just launched on pump.fun. The hacker soon sold the entire meme coin supply and rugged it to zero. However, the post used to deceive users has been deleted since.
As per the data shared by Lookonchain, an unfortunate user created a new wallet to seize the opportunity of bagging $MBAPPE token, not knowing about the possible scam, and got robbed of millions of dollars. The user reportedly spent 7,156 Solana (approx price $1.03 million) to buy the meme coin in a single transaction and lost $1 million in just 1 hour as the purchased holdings now stand at around $9.2k.
It added that another crypto trader went on to hit the jackpot. He reportedly spent just 0.2 Solana (approx worth $29) in order to buy $MBAPPE and went on to sell it just after 3 minutes for 866.14 SOL (approx worth $125.16K). This deal gave out a massive 4,330x return.
The trader had dealt with 251 meme coins over the past month where he just invested 0.1 SOL or more. He holds a win rate of 35.46% with a total profit of $126.7K.
This guy who trades #MEMEcoins like buying lottery tickets finally hit the 4,330x jackpot!
He spent 0.2 $SOL($29) to buy $MBAPPE and sold it 3 minutes later for 866.13 $SOL($125.16K), a 4,330x return!
Over the past month, he traded 251 MEMEcoins, investing 0.1 $SOL, 0.2 $SOL,… pic.twitter.com/hreNVUcyEF
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) August 29, 2024
Wu Blockchain reported that another user bought 2 SOL (approx worth $286) of the scam meme coin and sold it at a high point for a profit of about 1,398 SOL (approx worth $200K).
McDonald’s Instagram was also hijacked earlier
Recently, McDonald’s Instagram got hijacked by a hacker who promoted a meme coin called Grimace (GRIMACE30045-USD), a crypto inspired by their purple mascot. The meme coin’s market cap skyrocketed to $20 million before crashing below $1 million as scammers cashed out.
The hacker cleverly updated McDonald’s Instagram bio to brag about the $700K they swindled and directed users to invest via Pump.fun, promising big returns. However, they also took over McDonald’s senior marketing director’s Twitter to make the scam look legit. The hackers even claimed that Grimace holders would be followed by McDonald’s.
