A-list celebrities' Instagram accounts hacked to scam cryptocurrency

On Thursday, the official accounts #Instagram of Adele, Future, Tyla, and even Michael Jackson were taken over by hackers to promote a Solana meme coin.

The perpetrator posted an AI-generated image of rapper Future holding a coin engraved with the word FREEBANDZ – the name of his record label and fashion brand – to create a false trust that the coin was associated with the artist. In reality, this token was only created on the Pump.fun platform and had no connection to Future.

In a short period, the coin reached a market capitalization of nearly 900,000 USD, but then plummeted by 98% to about 20,000 USD when the token creation wallet dumped 700 million coins, equivalent to 70% of the supply. #Hacker pocketed 251.57 SOL (over 49,000 USD) before the “rug pull.”

The posts have been deleted, but by Friday afternoon, no artist had made an official statement. This is a familiar pump-and-dump scam: exploiting fame to inflate prices, then selling off, leaving investors empty-handed.

Previously, the UFC's Instagram account was also hacked, resulting in a loss of 1.4 million USD for users. Even Barack Obama and Elon Musk have been victims of similar schemes.

👉 Investors need to be extremely cautious: just because a big name is associated with cryptocurrency doesn't mean it's real. #anhbacong