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 fill his own Solana token with a flurry of posts on Friday afternoon.
But within minutes, after millions of dollars in cryptocurrency had already been spent, the truth emerged: His account had been hacked in a pump-and-dump scam.
In a series of rapid-fire tweets, 50 Cent’s Twitter account on Friday began making promotional posts for a new Solana token called GUNIT, launched via Pump.fun.
The posts were elaborate. Some referenced the rap icon’s brand of cognac; others cited recent celebrity-related crypto narratives, including that of Martin Shkreli creation of an alleged official token of Donald Trump Solana and the controversial promotion of the token by controversial influencer Andrew Tate DAD coin. One even contained a Solana-themed meme with 50 Cent in the center.
If you bought $GUNIT, your $5,000 investment just turned into 50 cents. pic.twitter.com/1oA0pea2R3
— SphynxLabs Fan $SPHYNX (@Ronald_Crypt0) June 21, 2024
While some crypto users were cautiously suspicious of the posts, it wasn’t even immediately certain that they were fake.
Meanwhile the money pours into GUNIT’s coffers. The bulk of the token’s total trading volume of $18.6 million arrived in just 40 minutes, surging 8,000%, and then plummeted as quickly as the liquidity disappeared.
Despite the warning signs, the investment rush unfortunately made sense. Recently, celebrity meme coins created through Pump.fun have skyrocketed in value with little more than the endorsement of a prominent personality. Tate-Promoted DADDY Token Went From Uselessness to a Market Cap of $340 Million last week; Iggy Azalea’s previous MOTHER token surpassed $200 million around the same time.
A screenshot of 50 Cent’s Instagram post about the hack. Image: Instagram
Soon, however, the GUNIT project fell apart. Soon after the token launch, 50 Cent announced via his Instagram account that his Twitter and website had indeed been hacked. (Perhaps in a sign of attention to detail on the hacker’s part, 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 inaccessible for writing.
GUNIT continued to plummet after the reveal, though not yet to the point of uselessness. To writing, the token it still maintains a market capitalization of around $150,000, with new purchases of the token continuing to arrive.
In 50 Cent’s Instagram update, the rapper and entrepreneur claimed that whoever made the exploit made $300 million. However, during its brief peak, the token only reached a small portion of the market capitalizationaccording to multiple data sources, not to mention the huge gap between a token’s market capitalization and the amount of liquidity a token’s creator could conceivably extract from it before it collapses.
50 Cent isn’t the first public figure to apparently suffer a cyber attack during the ongoing celebrity meme coin frenzy. Earlier this month, Hulk Hogan suffered a similar exploitation when hackers apparently hijacked his Twitter to promote a HULK token that saw $82 million in trading volume in a single day.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
