The Instagram accounts of superstar musicians Adele, Future, Tyla, and the late Michael Jackson were hacked to promote an unaffiliated Solana meme coin late Thursday. The hacker used the celebrities’ pages to share now deleted posts of what appears to be an AI rendering of Future, holding an oversized coin inscribed “FREEBANDZ”—the name of a record label and clothing line connected to the rapper, as well as the Solana meme coin promoted in the posts.
The rapper’s account is no longer active on Instagram, and the cryptocy does not appear to actually be linked to Future or his apparel brand. Created on popular Solana token launchpad Pump.fun, the meme coin briefly ran to an all-time high market cap just shy of $900,000 before collapsing by nearly 98%, to $20,000.
Following the run-up, the token’s creator—a Solana address ending in “zcmPHn”—dumped 700 million tokens, or 70% of the total supply in a single transaction, sending the price crashing down in the process. The rug-puller, likely connected to whoever hijacked the celebrities’ Instagram accounts, walked away with 251.57 SOL, or more than $49,000 at today’s Solana price. While the posts have been deleted, none of the celebrities that were compromised in Thursday’s hack have made public statements on Instagram or X as of Friday afternoon.
Hacking popular social media accounts to promote meme coins and other crypto scams is not a new phenomenon. Earlier this year, the UFC’s official Instagram account was hacked, leading to $1.4 million in losses for crypto users. And the creator of the character “Chill Guy” had his account stolen multiple times after a Solana meme coin based on the viral TikTok craze blew up to a $650 million market cap. Even Barack Obama and Elon Musk have seen their social media accounts swiped and misused in a malicious crypto scheme. Malicious actors typically seek to use prominent social media accounts to pump the value of a coin before selling and crashing the price—a classic pump-and-dump scheme.
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