Musk’s SpaceX and Starlink Hijacked as ‘SCATMAN’ Memecoin Rockets to $32M on Robinhood Chain

A Verified-Account Playbook Strikes Elon Musk’s Corporations

The compromise unfolded Sunday when each accounts, which belong to Elon Musk’s rocket maker SpaceX and its satellite tv for pc web unit Starlink, started amplifying promotional posts for the token earlier than the businesses regained management and deleted the fabric. Onchain information platform Solanafloor first flagged the breach on X with standard analytics agency Lookonchain, subsequently revealing:

A hacker launched a token referred to as SCATMAN and promoted it after hacking the @SpaceXAI and @Starlink accounts. The hacker then minted 10T SCATMAN and dumped all for 59 ETH ($108K).

A second pockets managed by the identical attacker bought one other 59.28 million SCATMAN for 14.7 ETH, price about $27,000, bringing complete proceeds to roughly 73.7 ETH. The token’s market capitalization reached $32 million at its peak earlier than sliding because the dump hit, whereas 24-hour buying and selling quantity climbed to $5.7 million.

The scheme is a well-recognized one the place miscreants hijack a verified company account with hundreds of thousands of followers, connect a token to the model’s credibility, and promote into the shopping for frenzy. Musk-linked names have lengthy been a favourite lure for crypto scammers, and the SpaceX and Starlink handles rank among the many most recognizable manufacturers on X.

New Chain, Outdated Scams

SCATMAN was deployed on Robinhood Chain, the buying and selling platform’s layer-2 community that went stay on July 1. The chain’s permissionless design has let anybody deploy tokens at scale, and its early days have been marked by a flood of fraudulent belongings alongside respectable initiatives.

As Bitcoin.com Information reported, cross-chain interoperability platform Relay Protocol has warned of honeypot tokens on the community (cash hardcoded so patrons can’t promote, or that switch funds straight to an attacker). The platform said:

There’s been a rise in rip-off tokens designed to take away themselves after buy. We’re blocking such tokens as they seem and verifying secure ones.

The SCATMAN incident layers a social media compromise on high of that surroundings. A token bearing a joke identify, minted within the trillions and promoted by hijacked flagship accounts, was in a position to entice $32 million in paper worth inside hours of the chain’s second week in operation. For patrons who chased the posts, the losses have been speedy as soon as liquidity drained.

Neither SpaceX nor X had issued an in depth assertion on how the accounts have been breached on the time of writing. Each accounts have been restored and the promotional posts eliminated by Sunday night.

In any case, the unanswered query remains to be attribution since Lookonchain’s pockets path provides investigators a place to begin, and former high-profile X account compromises have drawn scrutiny from U.S. authorities. Whether or not this one produces an enforcement response or just one other entry within the lengthy ledger of celebrity-brand token scams ought to develop into clearer within the days forward.