A pump and dump scam resulted from hackers seizing Kylian Mbappe’s X account and promoting a “$MBAPPE” token.
On Thursday, a cryptocurrency investor who had purchased the questionable meme coin $MBAPPE lost more than $1 million in an hour. The coin was falsely promoted through French soccer star Kylian Mbappé’s hacked X account.
The investor opened a new wallet and made a single transaction of 7,156 $SOL, or $1.03 million, into the $MBAPPE token, according to analytics firm Lookonchain. Nevertheless, since then, the investment’s value has decreased to just $9.2K.
Someone created a new wallet and spent 7,156 $SOL($1.03M) to buy a #MEMEcoin named $MBAPPE in a single transaction, which is now only worth $9.2K.
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) August 29, 2024
This person lost more than $1M in just 1 hour!😱https://t.co/IKsUN14km1 pic.twitter.com/kTF6SQCKT4
$MBAPPE Token’s Brief Surge Quickly Turns into a Crash
On Thursday, hackers gained access to French football player Kylian Mbappe’s X account and used it to publish several advertisements for the cryptocurrency “$MBAPPE,” which makes use of the memecoin deployer Pump.fun, located in Solana. Due to its ease of use, this platform has grown in popularity. With just a few clicks, it provides users with an affordable method of creating and launching their meme coins.
The ‘MBAPPE’ token swiftly spiked and then fell in a matter of minutes, according to several users. They emphasized that the posts were still visible at the time on Mbappe’s profile. Some speculated whether the posts resulted from a hack, or if Mbappe himself was involved in promoting the token. The posts have since been deleted.
A thread: Kylian Mbappe hacked X account tweets in the early hours of 29/08/2024: pic.twitter.com/uoC7ohTtR5
— KurdyAFC (@AfcKurdy) August 29, 2024
According to Chinese journalist Colin Wu, a user bought the token for 2 SOL, or roughly $286, and sold it for a profit of about 1,398 SOL, or roughly $200,000.
Scammers Previously Exploited Footballer’s Image in Crypto Scams
In 2019 and 2020, scammers misused the renowned footballer’s identity for crypto scams. They enticed investors with fictitious promises of rapid profits by using his image in internet advertisements promoting cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
Mbappe retaliated by suing to stop the improper use of his identity. In the meantime, more than 1,100 similar scam complaints were filed with the Financial Markets Authority of France in 2018, resulting in 55.5 million euros in losses for the victims.