A McDonald’s makeover gone wrong: Hackers transformed the golden arches into a crypto cash cow.
In the latest crypto news, Scammers pulled off a bold heist on August 21 by hacking the official McDonald’s Instagram account, making off with over $700,000 in Solana. The hackers used the fast food giant’s platform to promote a fake memecoin called “Grimace,” named after McDonald’s purple mascot.
According to screenshots shared on X, the compromised Instagram account posted multiple times, touting the bogus token as a “McDonald’s experiment on Solana.” These posts reached the account’s 5.1 million global followers, creating a buzz around the supposed token.
Blockchain analytics service Bubblemaps revealed that the hackers used the Solana memecoin deployer pump.fun to acquire 75% of the Grimace token’s total supply. They then distributed these tokens across approximately 100 different wallets.
DexScreener data shows that following these posts, the GRIMACE memecoin’s market capitalization skyrocketed from just a few thousand dollars to a staggering $25 million in just 30 minutes. However, this surge was short-lived. The hackers quickly dumped their holdings, causing the token’s value to plummet to around $650,000 within 40 minutes.
In the end, the hackers walked away with a profit of approximately $700,000 in Solana. They even updated the bio on McDonald’s Instagram page to boast about their success, writing, “Sorry mah n-gga you have just been rug pulled by India_X_Kr3w thank you for the $700,000 in Solana.”
As per trending crypto news, McDonald’s has since removed the unauthorized posts and restored its Instagram account. In a statement to the New York Post, the company acknowledged the “isolated incident” affecting its social media on August 21 and apologized to its fans for any offensive content that was posted during the breach.
