Renowned rapper Curtis James Jackson III, better known as “50 Cent,” has claimed that his X account and website were hacked, with hackers promoting a cryptocurrency pump-and-dump token scam.
Also referred to as a “Rug pull,” fraudulent developers created a new crypto token, “GUNIT,” and used Jackson’s large X following of approximately 12.9 million followers to attract more investors and pump up the price before draining its value. The token’s price then crashed to $0.00016.
On June 21, Jackson posted to his 32.8 million Instagram followers claiming that his X account and website had been hacked and that a significant amount of the victim’s funds had been drained from the project.
“Twitter worked quickly to lock my account back down. Whoever did this made $300,000,000 in 30 minutes,” Jackson said before declaring that he has “no association with this crypto.”
He posted three images showing posts from others in the crypto community discussing the GUNIT memecoin. The charts show a sharp price spike followed by a sharp decline — a typical rug-pull pattern.
Cointelegraph reviewed trading data of the GUNIT memecoin on Dex Screener, showing that multiple wallet addresses sold significant amounts of the token. Four accounts sold more than $100,000 of the memecoin following its promotion on the rapper’s X account.
50 Cent claimed that users had been defrauded of over $300 million as a result, a figure that grossly overstates the value that anonymous traders made from selling GUNIT tokens. At the time of publication, the token had a total trading volume of $19.4 million.
The news comes after a string of celebrities have been associated with cryptocurrency launches in recent times.
Rise in celebrities promoting memecoins
Caitlyn Jenner, one of the most recent celebrities to enter the crypto memecoin market, caused confusion within the industry over mixed messages following the launch of her own token.
Speculations about her X account being hacked were initially dismissed but resurfaced later. While at the same time, she was defending the JENNER token itself.
On May 27, Cointelegraph reported that Jenner’s X account had posted a statement urging followers to “send me some of your favourite memecoins.”
Related: Memecoins are a ‘cornerstone’ of crypto — Galaxy’s Novogratz
While she later took the post down, she doubled down on promoting JENNER.
“That ad for a third party token was taken down! As I have said from the beginning the only focus I have is $Jenner and the ad I posted confused too many people, and was not worth it. Like I had said time and time again I’m fully focused on my token $Jenner,” she posted on X.
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