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The crypto market is increasingly becoming uncontrollable in scams, with social engineering being one of the avenues. Recently, Elon Musk was baited into promoting a scam memecoin token, SLINK, linked to his company, Neuralink.
The memecoin token, Shivolink [SLINK], surged past $80 million in a few hours before crashing by over 95%. Here is how the events unfolded:
How Elon Musk was social engineered to promote SLINK
The X account of Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink executive who is also the mother of Elon Musk’s four children, was compromised. The hacker then made a post that did not make it obvious that it is a crypto project.
The post was an effective way to use social engineering to get Elon to react. However, Ryan Tanaka, a podcaster about Neuralink, said that someone hacked Shivon’s X account. He wrote,
This post below is very likely compromised.
But after Elon replied to the Neuralink post with an emoji, Ryan admitted he was wrong, which suggested Elon backed the project. As a result, the memecoin rallied aggressively.
However, this sudden rally did not last, as the aftermath proved it was a pump-and-dump scheme.
The post on Shivon’s account was deleted, leading to the coin crashing below $1 million in market cap. This confirmed Ryan’s original belief, and further investigations confirmed it. The Youtuber wrote,
This was a deep hack that appeared real. If you are ever trading a crypto coin, please be very careful.
The rug pull just adds another layer of crypto scams on top of technical DeFi hacks that have already cost $2 million in the first five days of September.
Most FOMO traders suffer the rug pull as insiders profit
With Elon Musk’s reply, many traders were lured into FOMOing the meme coin.
Four whales were sitting on losses exceeding $807K, as per Onchain Lens. These losses were just a fraction of the total, as most traders lost money as SLINK’s market cap fell by over $80 million.
However, the top 30 insider traders, probably connected to the hacker, made profits. These wallets bought SLINK tokens early and sold quickly, making $4.70 million, which is equivalent to over 1200x.
Altogether, the crypto community should be careful and multicheck before sending money to any project.
Final Summary
- Hacker baits Elon Musk into promoting a scam token, SLINK, which rallied past $80 million and crashed shortly after.
- About 30 insider wallets made over $4.70 million in profits, while most traders, including whales, lost money.