50 Cent's accounts and platforms have been reportedly hacked this weekend as the rapper started promoting pump-and-dump crypto scams to his millions of followers.
(Photo : Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Curtis James Jackson III, or 50 Cent, warned his followers that his X account and Thisis50.com webpage had been breached last Friday to advertise fake crypto coins.
My Twitter & https://t.co/iaLj5OUvRT was hacked I have no association with this Crypto. Twitter worked quickly to lock my account back down. Who ever did this made $3,000,000 in 30 minutes. pic.twitter.com/I07Eqpc2xl
— 50cent (@50cent) June 23, 2024
While X was able to lock his accounts quickly, 50 Cent claimed that the hackers "made $3,000,000 in 30 minutes" from promoting the supposed new meme coin $GUNIT.
50 Cent Hacking Likely a Pump-and-Dump Scams
CoinTelegraph reported the hacking is most likely a pump-and-dump scheme where scammers would release a new cryptocurrency and promote it on compromised accounts with huge following before draining its value.
True to the report, the $GUNIT meme coin's price crashed immediately from $1 million to $0.00016 per token after more people were notified about the scam.
The identities of the hackers who made the "rug pull" scam on 50 Cent's accounts remain unclear.
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More Celebrities Involved in Crypto Scams
The hacking on 50 Cent's accounts came as more celebrities' names got pulled into suspicious crypto schemes as scammers tried to use the personalities' goodwill to the public to deceive their followers.
Earlier in February, the late Matthew Perry's X account was hacked to promote a fake crypto-related site for people to help "others struggling with the disease of addiction."
While the situation was soon resolved after the real Matthew Perry Foundation came forward to warn customers, several followers of the "Friends" star have already been affected by the scam.
In some cases, scammers have been using the celebrities' images without consent to deceive potential customers about their legitimacy.
This is separate from the celebrities themselves getting involved in memecoin and other supposed new cryptocurrency businesses only for these platforms to shut down after draining millions of dollars from people.
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