The hackers’ posts remained live for a few hours before the team regained control of the account later that evening.
Scammers took over the X account of Delhi Capitals, a prominent cricket franchise in the Indian Premier League (IPL), to promote a fraudulent Solana-based token with the ticker symbol “HACKER”, misleading fans and crypto enthusiasts alike.
The incident took place on Tuesday, September 10. However, it seemed the hackers were testing the waters to see how the platform’s 2.6 million followers would react to the franchise’s adoption of crypto.
Delhi Capitals Regains Access to Account
According to reports citing the now-deleted post on X (formerly Twitter), the scammers posted that they had taken control of the account, openly stating, “Yes, this is a hacked account,” before announcing the launch of the fraudulent crypto token.
Data from DEX Screener showed that the so-called digital asset HACKER was created just a few days ago. The thieves claimed they could hack other X accounts that dared to interact with the token address.
The hackers’ posts remained live for a few hours before the team regained control of the account later that evening. Meanwhile, this is just one of the latest incidents of hackers hijacking the accounts of celebrities and prominent individuals to promote fake tokens. For example, Hollywood celebrities Sydney Sweeney and Bob Odenkirk had their X accounts compromised, and hackers used them to shill fake meme coins.
These scams, which involved tokens like $SWEENEY and $KIRK, generated significant trading volume before collapsing. The scammers reportedly made around $530,000 in one of the exploits.
A Wave of Celebrities Account Hacks on X
Other celebrities, such as Caitlyn Jenner and crypto influencers like Gigantic Cassocked-Rebirth (GCR), also fell victim to these attacks. In the case of Jenner, the hackers used her account to promote a crypto token known as JENNER. Within eight hours of launch, the digital asset generated a market cap of around $27.1 million.
As for GCR, the X account was used to promote an already-known cryptocurrency, ORDI, the native token of the Ordinals platform, and Luna2.0, the latest version of the collapsed Terra blockchain’s Luna. The two digital assets gained 6% and 274% within hours of the post on May 26.
Another celebrity, Dimitri Leslie Roger, an American musician known as Rich the Kid, also suffered the same fate. His account was hijacked to promote a token named “RICH”. According to reports, the token, developed through the help of Solana’s meme coin platform Pump.fun reached a market cap of $90,000 within the first two hours of trading before the post was deleted.
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