Hackers who seized control of the official McDonald’s Instagram account on Wednesday (Aug, 21) to promote and ‘rug pull’ a memecoin called ‘Grimace’, claimed they made off with over $700,000.
Screenshots shared across X show the fast food giant’s Insta page posting an image of their purple mascot, Grimace, and pushing McDonald’s 5.1 million followers to purchase a scam coin called GRIMACE.
After the attack, the scammers then changed the bio on the account to read: “Sorry mah n**ga you have just been rug pulled by India_X_Kr3w thank you for the $700,000 in Solana.”
Within 30 minutes, GRIMACE token went from zero to $25 million in value before crashing, according to the news site Cryptopolitan.
McDonald’s said in a statement to the New York Post, that it was “aware of an isolated incident that impacted our social media accounts earlier today.
“We have resolved the issue on those accounts and apologize to our fans for any offensive language posted during that time.”
In cryptocurrency, a “rug pull” is a malicious scam where the creators of a digital currency, often memecoins, abruptly remove funds from the coin’s liquidity pool and vanish, rendering investors’ tokens worthless as they make off with their gains.
Often, a “rug pull” begins with the creation of a fraudulent token, followed by aggressive marketing on social media platforms and online cryptocurrency communities.
The perpetrators generate excitement around the digital asset, by hyping up their coin and urging investors to buy early before its value rockets.
Once sufficient liquidity has been accumulated by pairing the fake coin with established cryptocurrencies like Solana or Ethereum, the creators drain the liquidity, causing the token’s value to crash to zero.
The fraudsters then erase their online presence, including social media accounts, making it very difficult for investors and authorities to trace them.
A @McDonalds employee just had his socials compromised, resulting in scam token $GRIMACE being posted on his personal X account and the brands IG.
The token hit $24m mcap and is now down below $400k. (the posts have been deleted) pic.twitter.com/Im5Z46poMV
— hotlneblng (@hotlneblng_) August 21, 2024
Featured image: ideogram
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