In a breach, hackers took control of McDonald’s official Instagram account on August 21, using it to promote a fraudulent memecoin based on the company’s well-known mascot, Grimace. The scammers managed to steal over $700,000 in Solana.
I’m lovin’ it!
The hackers hijacked McDonald’s Instagram, which boasts 5.1 million followers, to advertise a fake cryptocurrency named Grimace.
They falsely described the token as a McDonald’s experiment on Solana, luring followers into believing the scam was legitimate project.
As we can see on screenshots shared on X, the hackers orchestrated the scheme by using 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.
The posts on McDonald’s Instagram account caused the market capitalization of the Grimace token to surge from a few thousand dollars to $25 million in just 30 minutes.
Insider trading
The excitement was short-lived. Within 40 minutes, the token’s value plummeted to $650,000 as the hackers quickly dumped their holdings, causing the market to crash.
Bubblemaps, a blockchain analytics service revealed that the scammers walked away with an estimated $700,000 in Solana.
After this the hackers edited McDonald’s Instagram bio to bragging about their heist.
The updated bio read, “Sorry mah n-gga you have just been rug pulled by India_X_Kr3w thank you for the $700,000 in Solana,” cheering their loot.
PR incident
The posts and the bio have since been removed, and McDonald’s also restored its Instagram account to normal.
In a statement to the New York Post, McDonald’s acknowledged the breach, describing it as an isolated incident that compromised their social media accounts on August 21.
The company assured followers that the issue had been resolved.
