On Wednesday, McDonald's Instagram account was compromised in order to promote a memecoin called GRIMACE. With this fraud, the scammer allegedly managed to steal $700,000.
Scammer Uses McDonald's Instagram Account to Promote Fraudulent Memecoin
Wednesday, McDonald's Instagram account hacked to promote a memecoin called GRIMACE, named after one of the mascots of the famous fast-food chain. In addition, the X account of Guillaume Huin, the company's marketing director, also seems to have been affected, as he reported on McDonald's experimentation on Solana (SOL). As of now, all posts have been deleted:
McDonald's official Instagram account was suspected to have been hacked, claiming that it had issued the Meme token “GRIMACE” on Solana. The market value of GRIMACE rose to $25 million within 30m and then fell rapidly. Guillaume Huin, the marketing director of McDonald's, also… pic.twitter.com/uLrgxK1DCz
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) August 21, 2024
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According to a screenshot, the profile description was also changed to the following message: “Sorry n*gga, you just got rug pulled by India_X_Kr3w, thanks for the $700,000 on Solana“.
Modified McDonald's Instagram profile
According to a brief statement reported by the New York Post, McDonald's apologizes for the above commentsalthough nothing seems to have been said about the scam:
We have resolved the issue on these accounts and apologize to our fans for any offensive language posted during this time.
In an analysis, Bubblemaps reports that several addresses were previously used to purchase the token before distributing it to around a hundred addresses:
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
👉 Also in the news — Bank manager sentenced for embezzling customer funds using cryptocurrencies
As of this writing, the grimace token in question only has with a capitalization of approximately $420,000.
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Source: New York Post
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