Crypto scammers hack McDonald’s Instagram to promote Solana memecoin

Crypto scammers target fast food giant McDonald’s Instagram account to promote a sham memecoin launched on Solana-based pump.fun.

On August 21, the official Instagram account for McDonald’s was spotted posting multiple posts about a new token based on the company’s purple mascot Grimace. The posts were broadcast to over 5.1 million of the restaurant chain’s global followers.

Instagram fiasco

According to screenshots of the now-deleted posts, the scammers advertised the GRIMACE token as a “McDonald’s experiment on Solana.” However, the blockchain analytics platform Bubblemaps suggested that the scammers had already acquired 75% of the memecoin’s circulating supply using multiple wallets.

GRIMACE promoted on McDonalds Instagram page | Source: X

These tokens were then distributed across approximately 100 wallets to make things look genuine. A project with a single wallet holding most of a token’s supply would have raised a red flag for crypto investors.

With the tokens in control, the scammers went on to make a series of posts on Instagram to hype up the price of GRIMACE. The plan was a success, as unsuspecting users flocked in, to cash in on the lucrative opportunity of getting in on a memecoin early.

Within 30 minutes of the posts on McDonald’s accounts, the price of GRIMACE went from 0.00005 SOL to 0.025 SOL, amounting to a surge of roughly 500x. DexScreener data suggests the market capitalisation of GRIMACE went as high as $25 million within the same timeframe.

Soon after the pump, the scammers started dumping their massive holdings, which were estimated to have made roughly $700,000 in Solana with the rug pull. The price of memcoin slumped, with its market capitalisation down to $414,000 at the time of writing.

Further fanning flames, the attackers edited the bio section of the McDonald’s Instagram page, boasted their profits and said the attack was orchestrated by “India_X_Kr3w,” accompanied by an Indian flag.

The scammers also targeted McDonald’s marketing director Guillaume Huin, whose X account promoted the same coin. However, all the posts were later deleted.

Guillaume Huin’s X account promoting GRIMACE | Source: X

McDonald’s acknowledged the event as an “isolated incident” in comments to the New York Post and confirmed that the issue had been resolved.

While the fast food giant has no direct links to the cryptocurrency space, it has forayed into other avenues of Web3 over the years. In June, the company announced a metaverse project in Singapore called “My Happy Place.”

The metaverse rewarded users with in-game assets on their MetaMask wallets, which could be redeemed for tangible rewards. Last year, the firm also collaborated with the metaverse platform, The Sandbox, to launch McNuggets Land.

Memecoin scams

The cryptocurrency space has seen several attacks where scammers target popular social channels to promote sham tokens created on pump.fun, which are later dumped. In June, the X account of heavy metal band Metallica was compromised, and the scammers promoted the METAL token.

Prior to that, crypto scammer Sahil Arora managed to social engineer multiple celebrities by exploiting their lack of understanding of the Web3 space to orchestrate several pump-and-dump schemes. Arora has been linked to several meme tokens themed after celebrities like rapper Rich the Kid and American media personality Caitlyn Jenner.

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