Scammers post and promote $MBAPPE after hacking Mbappe’s Twitter account

On Thursday, crypto scammers released and promoted the token $MBAPPE after hacking the Twitter account of French soccer star Kylian Mbappe. The promotional tweets for $MBAPPE are has since been deleted. After the hack, the market value of $MBAPPE tokens rose to tens of millions within minutes before quickly plummeting back to zero.

Journalist Colin Wu reported that a user invested 2 SOL, about $286, in the token and then sold it at the peak, making a profit of around 1,398 SOL, worth $200,000.

One of the crypto investors fell victim to the scam and lost over $1 million within just an hour on Thursday after purchasing the token.

Someone created a new wallet and spent 7,156 $SOL($1.03 million) for the purchase of a #MEMEcoin called $MBAPPE in a single transaction, now worth only $9.2K.

This person lost more than $1 million in just one hour!😱https://t.co/IKsUN14km1 pic.twitter.com/kTF6SQCKT4

— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) 29 August 2024

Hackers used Mbappe’s Twitter account to post numerous promotions for the token “$MBAPPE”, which was created using the Solana-based memecoin deployer Pump.fun, a platform for creating and launching memecoins easily and quickly.

A few minutes after the promotional tweets, Crypto Twitter spotted the token “MBAPPE” rapidly increasing before dropping to zero within moments. This suspicious act led people to see through the hack and raise the alarm. The posts have since been deleted.

A Twitter user claimed that the person who hacked Mbappe’s account made almost $100,000 in an hour from the crypto scam, according to this graphic.

Besides carrying out the massive crypto heist, the hacker had the time of his life by publishing shitposts and tearing Twitter apart.

A thread: Kylian Mbappe hacked tweets from the X account in the early hours of 29.08.2024: pic.twitter.com/uoC7ohTtR5

— KurdyAFC (@AfcKurdy) 29 August 2024

This is not the first time that Mbappe’s account has been compromised to carry out a dubious scam. Back in 2019 and 2020, hackers promoted Bitcoin through the footballer’s Twitter account to lure investors with false promises of quick profits. Crypto hacks are on the rise, there’s no doubt about that. In July alone, 16 crypto hacks resulted in a whopping loss of $266 million.

Also read: NFT scammers hack University of the Philippines’ official Twitter account