Kanye West Exposes Meme Coin Scam—Says He Rejected $2M Deal

• Renowned American record producer reveals that he was offered $2 million to promote a fraudulent meme coin to his community. 
• The creators proposed to pay $750k upfront and pay the balance after 16 hours of posting about the token. 

American rapper and record producer Kanye West has, in the latest tweet, exposed the rot and the fraudulent schemes perpetuated in the meme industry. According to him, a supposed meme creator offered him $2 million to promote their fraudulent project to his community. However, he declined.

The Details

In a post made on February 7 and shared by Wu Blockchain, the famous American rapper highlighted that the promotional contract of the supposed project entailed a $750k payment upfront. Exactly 16 hours after the promotional post, an additional payment of $1.25 million was to be issued. However, the condition was for the post to stay “live” for eight hours.

According to Kanye West, the individual behind the contract revealed to him that the project was fake. In this case, he was supposed to make a post after eight hours, claiming his account was hacked and the post was made by the hackers.

Source: Wu Blockchain

An hour after this, Kanye West shared another screenshot containing a private conversation between himself and an X user. In the chat, Kanye asked the user to resend “a crypto connect” name that would not require a middleman. In response, the unnamed user mentioned Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and also assured him of returning with his phone number.

Joining this conversation, a user identified as “Armeano” proposed that Kanye sell his merchandise for cryptos and embrace Peer-to-Peer (P2P) money. To him, this would be more beneficial than launching a celebrity meme. Another user called Crypto Vic also disclosed that Kanye would not launch a meme coin. According to him, the rapper is merely creating a buzz ahead of his upcoming album release.

What this Mean to the Meme Industry

This disclosure reveals the rot in the meme ecosystem which is frequently plagued with rug pulls. According to reports, the Trump coin and VINE are the only celebrity tokens listed by Binance so far. Meanwhile, the Trump coin went ahead to surpass PEPE and Shiba Inu to become the second-largest meme before taking a nosedive, as noted in our earlier post.

VINE ascended to fame when one of the early founders of the video platform Vine, Rus Yusupov, posted a video announcement of launching a meme coin called VINE (VINECOIN). An hour after launch, the VINE token surged to more than $100 million in market cap. Later, the valuation reached $500 million with the price reaching $0.5.

Binance also announced on January 24 that it would launch the VINE token perpetual contracts. On that day, another coin called ALON, which was reported to have been created by the founder of Pump.fun, rose to fame. Its market cap quickly surged to $250 million.

Later, it was found that the coin was actually a Community Takeover token (CTO). Investigation shows that a user called ALON had posted on X to have paid for ownership of the token’s Telegram group and paid the Dexscreener fee over half a year ago.

Outside these, there have been several incidents of hackers pretending to be the official owners of X accounts to promote fake tokens. As mentioned in our 2022 news brief, a fake giveaway scheme impersonating MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor on social media made away with over $1 million worth of cryptos. In another update, we also examined an ongoing scam targeting XRP wallet belonging to the US Treasury.