The Twitter account of heavy steel band Metallica was apparently hacked late Tuesday and used to advertise a Solana meme coin, persevering with a current pattern of celebrities being focused to share pump-and-dump scams purporting to be the actual deal.
Though the tweets—which included a Twitter Areas audio name and replies to different customers—had been deleted inside 90 minutes, the pimped METAL token noticed greater than $10 million in buying and selling quantity earlier than crashing badly.
The obvious scammers claimed the token was being provided in collaboration with ticketing large Ticketmaster and crypto funds platform MoonPay, and that holders would be capable of use it for reductions on tickets and merchandise.
The incident comes lower than every week after the same rip-off focused the followers of rapper 50 Cent (aka Curtis Jackson), with legendary professional wrestler Hulk Hogan a goal earlier this month.
Given the frequency of such scams, Crypto Twitter swiftly and broadly concluded the tweets had been faux. MoonPay President Keith Grossman chimed in early to say METAL was not supported on the platform.
The scammers responded to Grossman, writing, “Now we have been in contact together with your group through e-mail.” MoonPay then tweeted a direct warning concerning the rip-off and cited a preferred music from the heavy steel giants, saying that anybody providing the METAL token is “not the grasp of puppets, they’re the grasp of scams.”
The commandeered Metallica account then blocked the corporate.
In its transient second within the highlight, the METAL token noticed greater than $10 million price of buying and selling quantity over 30,000 transactions as its worth spiked as excessive as $0.003. It has since collapsed nearly solely to below $0.00007. The token’s whole market cap sits at simply $65,000 at current.
Unsurprisingly, Twitter customers seized on the chance to make Metallica jokes. The account for LimeWire, which was as soon as a file-sharing service that vexxed Metallica and different bands and musicians earlier than being shut down for facilitating music piracy in 2010, received in on the motion.
“Hey Lars, is that this you?” LimeWire tweeted, referencing the outspoken Metallica drummer and co-founder Lars Ulrich who railed in opposition to music sharing providers again when.
The revived LimeWire model is as we speak a generative AI platform for musicians and different artists—with its personal $LMWR token—after first relaunching as a music NFT market.
The rip-off focusing on the Rock and Roll Corridor of Fame inductees is barely the most recent in a string of celebrity-themed pump-and-dumps for Solana meme cash. The waters are muddied significantly, nonetheless, as a number of celebrities have launched their very own official tokens in current weeks.
Earlier this week, singer Jason Derulo launched his personal JASON token, apparently in collaboration with Sahil Arora, a crypto promoter who has already been entangled in disputed meme coin launches with celebrities like Iggy Azalea and Caitlyn Jenner.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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