An unknown group of crypto scammers has seemingly missed their payday after hacking their way into several high-profile social media accounts on Sept. 18 — only to end up with a few thousand bucks.

On Sept. 18, blockchain sleuth “ZachXBT” alerted the crypto community that several “large accounts on X” were compromised, all posting a Solana memecoin called HACKED.

Some of the infiltrated accounts included Lenovo India, Yahoo News UK, MoneyControl, Oliver Stone, People, and Krystal DeFi. 

But unlike other run-of-the-mill X account hacks, the latest string of attacks was a little different. 

The scammers made it clear the account was hacked and weirdly tried to use that to shill the token. On each compromised X account, they wrote: 

“On each account we hack we publish the token address so we pump it and make profits together.”  

The apparent transparency didn’t seem to work. ZachXBT said the scammers “likely lost money purchasing this method as the top traders have barely made $1,000, and the market cap was $67,000,” adding they likely only made $8,000 off the scam. 

“They removed liquidity for the meme coin and only made $8K off the scam.” 

According to DEXscreener, the Solana-based HACKED token pumped 900% in around an hour before dumping again. It has since collapsed and has a market capitalization of $3,100, though there are several other tokens with the same name on Solana DEXs. 

Price chart for HACKED/SOL. Source: DEXscreener

ZachXBT noted that few details about the heist are available but said “I would expect these accounts all gave permissions to the same site or app.”

He reminded X users to always go into the settings and revoke connected apps that are not used. 

It is not the first time scammers have targeted X accounts to pump dodgy tokens. In May, a hacking spree targeted crypto industry influencers and celebrities to make it seem they were shilling various memecoins. 

Other crypto entities, including MicroStrategy, Algorand, Rocket Pool, Compound Finance, Ava Labs, and even Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, have had their X accounts hacked over the past year.

Low fee, high throughput blockchains such as Solana and Base have become a hotbed for scam tokens and memecoins this year.

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