Hackers Hack McDonald’s Instagram Account, Make $700,000 Promoting Grimace Memcoin
Date: 2024-08-22 Author: Oliver Abernathy Categories: BUSINESS
The hackers managed to steal over $700,000 in Solana cryptocurrency by using the McDonald’s page to promote and subsequently crash the price of a memecoin called Grimace.
According to screenshots posted on social media platform X, the McDonald’s account published a series of posts promoting the memecoin as a supposed “McDonald’s experiment on the Solana platform” available to its 5.1 million followers worldwide.
According to analytics service Bubblemaps, the attacker first used the Solana memcoin deployer pump.fun to purchase 75% of the total supply of Grimace tokens, then distributed them across about 100 different wallets.
After the posts on McDonald’s official page, the price of GRIMACE skyrocketed, increasing its market cap from a few thousand dollars to $25 million in just 30 minutes, according to DexScreener. The hacker then dumped his tokens, causing the price of the memcoin to plummet to $650,000 within 40 minutes.
Bubblemaps reported that the hackers made about $700,000 in Solana as a result of their actions.
After the attack, the hacker also changed the description on McDonald’s profile to boast about his success, claiming that he had managed to make $700,000.
“Sorry, you just got rug pulled by India_X_Kr3w, thanks for the $700,000 in Solana,” the hacker wrote.
The posts promoting the memecoin and the profile description have been removed, and the account has been restored to normal.
McDonald’s told the New York Post that they are aware of an “isolated incident” that affected their social media accounts on August 21.
“We have resolved the issue and apologize to our fans for any offensive language posted during this time,” McDonald’s said.
