- The Ava Labs COO’s X-Account promoted a suspicious memecoin project and posted links to fake AVAX giveaways.
- Users soon realized the account had been hacked and warned others on the platform.
Users on X suspected that Ava Labs COO Luigi D’Onorio DeMeo’s X account was hacked after he promoted a memecoin project and directed users to suspicious airdrops. The memecoin he posted about tokenized the main character of the Pokémon franchise, Pikachu, with the post containing a Solana-based contract address. Users immediately warned that the memecoin was a pump-and-dump scheme.
The post on the compromised account read: “I’m a @avax Maxi but it’s inevitable that Solana will lead this bull market… Due to the increasing search for memecoins, I’m creating the $PIKA token on @Solana based on my favorite character.”
The post has since been deleted. Following the publication of this post, the market cap of the PIKA token rose to almost $390,000, but shortly afterward saw a loss of over 99% in value. At the time of writing, the market cap was just over $2,200.
The account also posted malicious links disguised as airdrops
However, the malicious activity through DeMeo’s account did not end there. Several posts appeared claiming to offer airdrops for AVAX, Avalanche’s native token. The websites the links led to were designed to look very similar to the Avalanche website to deceive unsuspecting users. These websites asked users to connect their crypto wallets to receive the freebies. However, these links were malicious and hid crypto drainers that would steal tokens from users’ wallets.
The malicious actors have also disabled commenting on these posts to prevent users from warning each other about what lies behind the links. They have also posted a comment of their own, blocking users from commenting on the posts because they post malicious links.
A now-deleted post promoting the airdrop scam reads: “I’m so excited to announce that @avalabs has been selected to host Avalanche’s first #AVAX distribution. I look forward to the growth this distribution will bring to the ecosystem!”
How DeMeo’s X account was hacked is still unknown.
