Animoca Brands’ co-founder and executive chairman, Yat Siu, recently fell victim to a hacking incident that promoted a fake token named ANIMOCA. The hacker managed to compromise Siu’s official X account, claiming that Animoca was launching a new token. The post quickly caused the price of the fake ANIMOCA token, created on the pump.fun platform, to spike by 500% within just five minutes.
However, the surge was short-lived, as the hacker deleted the post, causing the token’s price to drop. Animoca Brands confirmed the hack, urging investors to refrain from engaging with Siu’s account. In a follow-up post, Yat Siu revealed that the attacker had bypassed his two-factor authentication (2FA) security and reported the issue to X’s support team.
Sui also promised to share insights about the security breach and expose vulnerabilities within X’s platform. Animoca Brands reassured the community that no official token or NFT launch is planned. They clarified that the hacker’s claims of a Solana-based token launch were entirely false. The company remains one of Web3’s leading investors, with a portfolio featuring names like Yuga Labs, Axie Infinity, and Polygon.
This hack is just one of many security breaches in the crypto space. In December, scammers also stole $100,000 through a fake CLAUDE token after hacking Anthropic’s X account. The growing number of such attacks shows that access control vulnerabilities continue to be a major risk in the crypto world, with over $1.9 billion in losses reported in 2024 alone.
