An investigation has linked the team behind a newly launched memecoin to the recent hack of a crypto influencer account.

An analysis carried out by pseudonymous sleuth ZachXBT revealed that the Sol team, makers of the Solana-based memecoin CAT, compromised the X account of crypto influencer Gigantic-Cassocked-Rebirth (GCR) on May 26, intending to manipulate the price of specific coins.

The team reportedly manipulated its own coin launch on May 24 to gain control of more than 63% of the CAT supply. Over $5 million worth of the CAT memecoin was then sold, and profits were divided among multiple wallets.

Part of the funds were later deposited into Hyperliquid for trading. Minutes before the hack, the exploiters opened long positions of $2.3 million on ORDI (ORDI) and $1 million on Ether.fi (ETHFI). In trading, a long position is a bet that an asset’s price will rise in the future.

The attacker then used GCR’s hacked account to post about ORDI, temporarily spiking the token’s price and netting approximately $34,000. A second post was made targeting the ETHFI token. However, this time, the market did not react as expected. After losing $3,500, the hacker closed the position.

“Scammers are low iq as evident by the awful execution,” said ZachXBT about the attack outcome. ZachXBT continued:

“People let a scammer farm them for 7 figs just bc they purchased an expensive username and made mysterious posts. Stop giving meme coin callers a platform.”

It’s unclear if the group is behind other similar attacks targeting crypto influencers over the previous days. 

A SIM swapping attack caused the breach on the influencer’s account, according to ZachXBT’s analysis. This scheme involves a scammer tricking a mobile carrier into transferring a victim’s phone number to a new SIM card controlled by the scammer.

Malicious actors have found memecoins to be a rich vector for attacks. Popular strategies to deceive traders include promoting a memecoin to inflate prices and then selling tokens at the peak or suddenly draining all funds from the liquidity pool.

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