Ava Labs COO’s X Account Hacked, Promotes Scams

3 months ago 2

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Ava Labs COO’s X account promoted a suspicious memecoin project and posted links to fake AVAX giveaways.
Users soon realized the account was hacked and warned others on the platform.

Users on X suspected the X account of Ava Labs COO Luigi D’Onorio DeMeo to be hacked after it promoted a memecoin project and directed users to suspicious airdrops. The memecoin it posted about symbolized the Pokémon franchise’s central character, Pikachu, with the post containing a Solana-based contract address. Users immediately warned of the memecoin being a pump-and-dump scheme.

The post on the compromised account read, “I’m an @avax maxi, but it’s inevitable that Solana is leading this bull market… Due to the increased search for memecoins, I’m creating the $PIKA token on @Solana, based on my favorite character.”

The post has since been taken down. Following this post going live, the PIKA token’s market cap surged close to $390,000 but observed over a 99% decline in value very shortly. Its market cap was a little over $2,200 at the time of writing.

The Account Also Posted Malicious Links Disguising Them as Airdrops

That is not where the malicious activity conducted through DeMeo’s account ended. Multiple posts made their way, claiming to be offering AVAX, Avalanche’s native token, airdrops. The websites the links led to were designed closely to the Avalanche website to trick unsuspecting users. These sites asked users to connect their crypto wallets to receive the giveaways. However, these links were malicious, hiding crypto drainers that would grab tokens from user wallets.

The bad actors also turned off comments on these posts to prevent users from warning each other about the nature of what lay on the other side of the links. They further issued their own comment about preventing users from commenting on the posts due to them posting malicious links.

One post, now deleted, promoting the airdrop scam read, “Very excited to share that @avalabs has been chosen to host Avalanche’s first #AVAX distribution. Looking forward to the growth this distribution will bring to the ecosystem!”