Crypto Scams: When Celebrities Become the New Target Practice! 🎯💸

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In the year of our digital lord, 2024, the realm of cryptocurrency found itself besieged by a most peculiar breed of trickster—those who wielded the art of social engineering like a maestro conducts a symphony. Analysts, with furrowed brows and a hint of bemusement, proclaimed that the glittering stars of the celebrity firmament and the titans of technology had become the favored prey of these modern-day brigands.

On the fateful day of February 11, a report emerged from the hallowed halls of Merkle Science, a firm dedicated to the arcane arts of blockchain forensics. They unveiled a tapestry of deceit woven with the threads of high-profile hacks, where the unsuspecting were lured into the abyss of fake token launches, birthed upon the dubious shores of Pump.fun—a veritable playground for the minting of tokens on Solana.

Among the tales of woe, one stood out like a sore thumb at a black-tie gala: the infamous hack of soccer sensation Kylian Mbappé’s X account on August 29. The nefarious hacker, with the audacity of a cat burglar, promoted a fictitious MBAPPE meme coin, which soared to a dizzying $460 million market cap before plummeting like a lead balloon, leaving investors clutching their chests in despair, nursing losses exceeding $1 million. Talk about a kick in the shins! ⚽💔

“By compromising influential figures and trusted platforms, hackers exploit credibility to manipulate investors at scale.”

— Merkle Science

In a grand total, the New York-based firm unearthed 36 such scams in the previous year, with celebrities making up a staggering 33% of the unfortunate victims. Tech figures and their companies followed closely behind, accounting for 30% and 19% of the cases, respectively. Meanwhile, government agencies and consumer brands were mere footnotes in this saga, each representing a paltry 5% of the incidents. On average, these beleaguered victims boasted a following of 2.3 million souls, a testament to their influence and, alas, their vulnerability.

Most of these digital ambushes transpired on X, the social network that bore the brunt of 75% of all cases. YouTube, ever the second fiddle, accounted for 19%, while official website hacks languished at a mere 5%. The scammers, those crafty devils, employed tactics as old as time—phishing links and the cunning bypassing of two-factor authentication. The two predominant forms of trickery were rug pulls and phishing, which together comprised a staggering 88% of all crypto-related attacks in 2024. Who knew the digital age could be so… entertaining? 🎭💰

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2025-02-11 14:54