- A downtrodden Solana investor created a new wallet to buy MBAPPE coins.
- The Solana trader’s investment shrunk from $1M to below $10K in minutes.
- 2024 has seen a tsunami of celebrity crypto rug pulls, mostly due to hacks.
A crypto investor had to bid adieu to their $1 million investment after purchasing a counterfeit meme coin titled $MBAPPE. The spontaneous decision to buy a Kylian Mbappé token came after fraudsters promoted a Solana meme coin named after the famous French soccer player.
Another Celebrity Meme Coin Bites the Dust
Made on Pump.Fun, MBAPPE was endorsed on the official Kylian Mbappé X account, which was hacked late Thursday night. The tweets promoting the token included the smart contract address, the coin’s ticker symbol, and an image of the soccer star as a Ninja Turtle. “After all, I do look like Donatello,” one of the hacker’s tweets concludes.
What happened next shocked many crypto enthusiasts, who believed that the $MBAPPE coin was a legit celebrity coin. Minutes after launch, the counterfeit crypto was rug-pulled. For the uninitiated, rug pulls are made by removing most of a cryptocurrency’s liquidity, drastically reducing the coin’s market value.
Investor Surfaces to Ask Mbappe for Refund
The ill-fated meme trader bought 93 million MBAPPE tokens for $1.03 million, or 7,156 Solana (SOL) for $0.0111. The token printed a massive red candle in a few minutes, leaving just $9.2K out of the initial $1.03 million investment.
The investor inquired about possible reimbursement. “wen refund @KMbappe ???,” asked President Push, a self-proclaimed alpha caller and ****coin maxi with a following of over 15,000 followers on X.
Soon after the incident, Mbappé’s Twitter account was cleansed of the hacker’s tweets. The soccer star himself did not comment on the hack. The pandemic of celebrity meme coin rug pulls has taken its toll with numerous hacks since June, mostly targeting fans of musicians.
On the Flipside
- In 2021, Kylian Mbappé took legal action against scammers who attempted to use his name to obtain funds through miscellaneous crypto-related online ads.
- A Chinese blockchain journalist, Colin Wu, reported that another Solana trader spent 2 SOL and managed to sell at its peak for a $200K profit.
Why This Matters
Misusing the identity of famous people to lure crypto enthusiasts into buying counterfeit coins has been a go-to tactic for online fraudsters in 2024.
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