With so many celebrities launching their own meme coins in recent weeks, it seemed entirely plausible that rapper 50 Cent (aka Curtis Jackson) would take to Twitter to promote his own Solana token with a flurry of posts on Friday afternoon.
But within minutes, after millions of dollars were spent on cryptocurrency, the truth came out: Their account had been hacked to promote a pump and dump scam.
In a series of quick tweets, 50 Cent’s Twitter account began making promotional posts on Friday for a new Solana token called GUNIT, launched through Pump.fun.
The publications were elaborate. Some referenced the rap icon’s brand of cognac; Others mentioned recent celebrity-related cryptocurrency narratives, including creation by Martin Shkreli of an alleged official Donald Trump token on Solana, and the promotion of controversial influencer Andrew Tate of Daddy DADDY coin. One of them even featured a Solana-themed meme with 50 Cent in the center.
While some cryptocurrency users were cautiously wary of the posts, it was also not immediately clear if they were fake.
Meanwhile, money flowed into GUNIT’s coffers. Most of the token’s $18.6 million total trading volume occurred in just 40 minutes, as it soared 8,000%, only to drop as quickly as liquidity disappeared.
Screenshot of 50 Cent’s Instagram post about the hack. Image: Instagram
Quickly, however, the GUNIT scheme fell apart. Shortly after the token launch, 50 Cent advertisement through his Instagram account that his Twitter account and website had been hacked. (Perhaps as a sign of the hacker’s attention to detail, the real rapper actually tagged his brand of cognac in the update.)
50 Cent’s Twitter account was also blocked by the platform; all posts on the account are not accessible at this time.
GUNIT continued its free fall following the revelation, although it has not yet reached a value of zero. Right now, the token maintains a market capitalization of approximately $150,000, and recent purchases of the token continue to come in large quantities.
In 50 Cent’s Instagram update, the rapper and businessman claimed that whoever carried out the exploitation made off with $300 million. However, the coin only reached a small fraction of that market capitalization during its brief peak.according to multiple data sources—not to mention the huge difference between a coin’s market capitalization and the amount of liquidity the coin’s creator could conceivably extract from it before it crashed.
50 Cent is not the first public figure to apparently suffer a hack during the ongoing celebrity meme coin frenzy. Earlier this month, Hulk Hogan suffered a similar exploitation when hackers apparently took over his Twitter account to promote the HULK token that saw a trading volume of $82 million in a single day. Last week; Iggy Azalea’s MOTHER token crossed $200 million around the same time.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
