Rapper Wiz Khalifa’s social media account on X was reportedly hacked on November 3, resulting in now-deleted posts promoting a fraudulent cryptocurrency, “WIZ.”
The posts targeted Khalifa’s 35.7 million followers, misleading them to believe it was an official project backed by Khalifa and a “team.” The scheme briefly gained traction but soon saw WIZ’s value crash as early buyers quickly offloaded their holdings.
Within minutes of its launch on the Solana-based platform Pump.fun, the memecoin surged to a market cap of $3.4 million, only to plummet to under $28,000 in less than an hour.
According to DEX Screener, WIZ’s current trading value stands at $8,400. Aggregated data from Solscan revealed that two primary wallets purchased over 155 million WIZ tokens at launch, investing $19,100 and later reselling them for a combined profit of $160,000.
In a warning to their Telegram followers, Blockchain investigator ZachXBT advised against buying WIZ, linking the incident to the same individual behind a previous breach of Truth Terminal developer Andy Ayrey’s X account on October 29. Ayrey’s account had similarly been exploited to promote a slew of fake tokens, generating $1.5 million in illicit earnings for the hackers.
This attack is the latest in a spate of recent high-profile account breaches. On October 18, the X account of DeFi protocol EigenLayer was hacked to promote a fake airdrop campaign. Hackers posted a message that mimicked a legitimate update, leading users to a malicious site masquerading as an airdrop claim portal.
In late May 2024, the X accounts of several prominent figures and celebrities in the crypto industry were hacked to promote various cryptocurrencies, including Luna2, ORDI, and celebrity-themed memecoins. A victim later alleged that employees of the social media platform had been “bribed” to grant hackers administrative access to their accounts. However, ZachXBT claimed that the creators of a new memecoin orchestrated the breach.
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