- Hackers hijacked Wiz Khalifa’s X account to promote $WIZ memecoin
- Celebrity-themed memecoins often lead to scams, as hackers exploit high-profile accounts.
In a surprising twist, rapper Wiz Khalifa’s X account has become the target of hackers promoting a memecoin called $WIZ through Pump.fun. According to BAccording to lockchain investigator ZachXBT, the hackers could be the same ones who previously took control of the Truth Terminal founder’s X account.
Wiz Khalifa’s account hacked
In the brief period before the post was deleted, Khalifa’s hacked account promoted the $WIZ token, creating significant buzz among followers.
The hackers noted:
“The rapper is working with my team to bring $WIZ to all crypto fans.”
This led to a brief surge in the value of the WIZ memecoin, with the same value peaking at $3.4 million in its first 15 minutes.
However, this summit did not last. In the hour that followed, the token’s market cap plummeted to below $28,000 as early investors quickly sold their holdings. At the time of writing, WIZ was trading at around $8,400, a steep decline of 93.67% in the last 24 hours, according to DEX Screener.
This rapid rise and fall highlighted a classic pump and dump pattern common to fraudulent tokens.
ZachXBT issues a word of warning
As expected, blockchain investigator ZachXBT alerted the community via a Telegram channel, sharing a screenshot of a deleted post from Khalifa’s X account.
Source: ZachXBT
ZachXBT has warned traders against Pump.fun’s WIZ memecoin, suspecting a scammer may have compromised Khalifa’s account to promote fraudulent tokens.
He said,
“Don’t buy the Wiz Khalifa pump fun (token), this is the same hacker who compromised Andy Ayrey (creator of Truth Terminal) the other day.”
Although the identity of the hacker remains unknown, blockchain investigator ZachXBT believes the same individual breached Andy Ayrey’s account. ZachXBT believes that the recent hack of Wiz Khalifa’s X account is linked to the same attacker who hijacked Ayrey’s account on October 29.
In this incident, scammers used Ayrey’s account to promote a questionable memecoin called Infinite Backrooms (IB). This piece is inspired by the AI chat experiment that led to the creation of the Truth Terminal project.
By promising airdrops to users who promoted the associated Telegram group, the scammers bilked more than $600,000 from unsuspecting subscribers.
Other similar incidents
Needless to say, the rise of celebrity-themed memecoins, like Iggy Azalea’s MOTHER, has inspired imitators eager to cash in on famous names.
However, this trend has also fueled scams, with hackers exploiting high-profile accounts to promote fraudulent tokens.
For example, recently, hackers took over Kylian Mbappé’s X account to promote the MBAPPE token. This resulted in an investor losing over $1 million as the value of the coin plummeted within an hour. Similar incidents have targeted celebrities like Jason Derulo and Metallica.
