Summary
- The official Instagram accounts for Adele, Michael Jackson, and Future were reportedly compromised to promote a meme coin.
- This token, named after a clothing brand linked to Future, experienced a market cap nearing $900K before crashing.
- The scammer made roughly $49,000 after liquidating most of the tokens.
The Instagram pages of renowned artists Adele, Future, Tyla, and the late Michael Jackson were hacked to endorse a non-associated Solana meme coin late Thursday.
The hacker utilized the celebrities’ accounts to share now-deleted posts featuring what seems to be an AI-generated image of Future, clutching a large coin marked “FREEBANDZ”—the name of a brand associated with the artist and the Solana meme coin mentioned in the posts.
Future’s Instagram account is currently inactive, and there’s no real affiliation between the cryptocurrency and his brand.
Launched on the popular Solana token platform Pump.fun, the meme coin briefly reached a peak market cap just under $900,000 before dropping nearly 98%, plummeting to $20,000.
After this surge, the token’s creator—a Solana address concluding with “zcmPHn”—dumped 700 million tokens, equivalent to 70% of the total supply, in one transaction, causing the price to tumble.
The individual behind this scheme, likely linked to the hacking of the celebrities’ accounts, walked away with 251.57 SOL, translating to over $49,000 at current Solana values.
Though the posts have been removed, none of the celebrities affected by Thursday’s breach have issued public comments on Instagram or X as of Friday afternoon.
Hacking high-profile social media accounts to promote meme coins and scams isn’t a new trend.
Earlier this year, the UFC’s official Instagram was compromised, resulting in losses upwards of $1.4 million for crypto investors. Furthermore, the creator of the “Chill Guy” character faced multiple account thefts following a Solana meme coin’s rise to a $650 million market cap sparked by a viral TikTok trend.
Even Barack Obama and Elon Musk have had their social media profiles compromised and exploited in malicious cryptocurrency schemes. Malicious actors often leverage prominent accounts to elevate a coin’s value before offloading it and crashing the price, typical of a pump-and-dump operation.
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