- Hackers seized control of McDonald’s Instagram account to promote fake Grimace tokens, making away with about $700,000 from investors.
- McDonald’s has successfully recovered its account and deleted all related posts.
On Wednesday, August 21, the official Instagram account of fast food giant McDonald’s, with over 5 million followers, was compromised and used to promote a short-lived Grimace-themed Solana meme coin created on popular launcher Pump.fun.
According to reports, the hackers also maliciously seized control of the personal X account of Senior Marketing Director Guillaume Huin to extol the new Grimace token. One of the posts on Huin’s account urged holders to mention their Instagram handle for a follow-up.
If you’re a holder of $GRIMACE, drop your Instagram handles below, and we will follow you on the official McDonald’s account. We love and appreciate all the support of Grimace.
A few moments later, the price skyrocketed by 195,000% to a market cap of $25 million. However, the scammers “rug pulled” the token’s liquidity down to $1 million in a few minutes and subsequently triggered a price fall to almost zero.
Later, the hackers changed the bio of McDonald’s Instagram account to “you have just been rug pulled” and “Thank you for the $700,000 in Solana.” The hackers also indicated in the now-deleted bio that KFC is next.
How Hackers Executed This Scheme with Grimace
Explaining what happened, blockchain data visualization startup Bubblemaps stated on X that the hackers, before the staggering price surge, purchased about 75% of the token’s supply with multiple wallet addresses and distributed them to 100 wallets. After the price reached a reasonable level, the hackers liquidated all their holdings to rake in $700k.
hacker owned 75% of the supply. used multiple addresses to buy on Pumpfun simultaneously, then spread into ~100 addresses. sold for $700k. thanks, @McDonalds 🍟 https://t.co/Gt9yb3V3qp pic.twitter.com/ojLoiJamdy— Bubblemaps (@bubblemaps) August 21, 2024
According to experts, several crypto traders might have accumulated in the early stages to increase the trading volume to over $20 million in less than two hours.
Since the incident, some McDonald’s fans have come out to express their shock, with one user admitting to having lost all his tokens.
I just lost it all on the grimace coin. Imagine getting rugged by McDonalds.
Currently, McDonald’s seems to have recovered its Instagram account. It deleted all posts related to the meme coin and apologized for the incident.
We are aware of the isolated incident that impacted our social media account earlier today. We have resolved the issue on those accounts and apologized to our fans for any offensive language posted during that time.
Grimace, the name used by the hackers, is an iconic purple McDonald’s character that has been the centre of viral memes and trends.
Rug Pulls and Crypto Hacks Leads to Hundreds of Millions of Losses in 2024
In a report released by security service provider Immunefy, $473 million worth of crypto was lost through hacks and rupulls as of May 2024. According to the report, $52 million was stolen in May alone, with Gala Games and SonneFinance losing $21 million and $20 million, respectively. Fascinatingly, this is reported to be a 12% decrease from the May 2023 amount.
In another crypto crime report, a whopping amount of $171.4 million was lost in April, pushing the total amount lost in 2024 to above $1 billion.
Over the years, hackers have resorted to using the social media handles of popular firms and celebrities to promote their fake coins, with Blockchain Capital becoming a victim in 2023. In October 2021, we also reported how the DeFi project Anubis DAO raised $60 million in a day and lost it all in an alleged pull.
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