protos.com
In recent months, a total of $3.5 million worth of SOL has been raised by Pump Fun-based memecoins after being promoted via hacked X and Instagram accounts.
Scammers targeted accounts belonging to businesses and celebrities such as McDonald’s, Usher, and Wiz Khalifa. They used their wide reach to tease a token’s ticker or contract address, or simply link to a token’s Pump Fun page.
Blockchain investigator ZachXBT has traced the initial funding of each of the 16 tokens on the Solana-based launchpad, connecting each incident to funds raised from the preceding scams.
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The incidents were linked either by direct funding between associated addresses, or the fact that proceeds were transferred into shared crypto casino deposit addresses.
The affected social media accounts were wide-ranging and also include Breaking Bad actor Dean Norris, Enoshima Aquarium in Japan, Andy Ayrey (creator of AI crypto bot ‘Truth Terminal’), and the owner of Kabosu, the Shiba Inu behind the original ‘Doge’ meme and its associated crypto.
The results of the scams were also varied, with the most lucrative target being Andy Ayrey at a total of $2.2 million across six tokens launched. The McDonald’s GRIMACE token netted over $690,000, and proceeds from the USHER token totaled 4,868 SOL worth approximately $650,000 at the time, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
Once an account is hacked, it can be difficult to regain full control; in the Andy Ayrey case, the X account was compromised for a number of days. Blockchain security expert Pablo Sabbatellla detailed the frustrations involved in trying to recover accounts and dealing with X’s “terrible security UX.”
Teasing a “Part 2” of the investigation, ZachXBT has also promised to “expose multiple threat actors linked to the 9+ compromises,” on top of the “on-chain connections.”
Past investigations have led to the arrest of scammers in both France and the US.
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All fun and games?
Pump Fun has recently devolved into a hive of extreme attention-grabbing behavior, with token creators resorting to increasingly shocking lengths to stand out amongst the approximately 50,000 tokens being launched daily.
The race to the bottom, which reportedly included creators threatening murder, suicide, and other extreme acts, culminated in the platform removing its live-streaming feature on Monday.
Read more: Pump Fun livestreams spark backlash from disgusted traders
In a ‘moderation message’ posted directly to the Pump Fun website, the team informed users that the feature would be paused “for an indefinite time period until the moderation infrastructure is ready to deal with the heightened levels of activity.”
Since its launch in January, Pump Fun has made over a quarter of a billion dollars in fees across almost four million tokens created on the platform, according to a dashboard on Dune Analytics.