Rapper Curtis James Jackson III, popularly known as “50 Cent,” has stated that hackers exploited his website and X account to promote a cryptocurrency pump-and-dump token scheme. Fraudulent engineers established a new cryptocurrency token called “GUNIT,” sometimes known as a “Rug pull,” and took advantage of Jackson’s enormous X following of over 12.9 million followers to draw in more investors and drive up the price before depleting its value. The price of the coin immediately plummeted to $0.00016. Jackson claimed on June 21 that his X account and website had been hacked and that a large portion of the victim’s finances had been taken out of the project in a post to his 32.8 million Instagram followers.
“Twitter worked quickly to lock my account back down. Whoever did this made $300,000,000 in 30 minutes,” Jackson said before declaring that he has “no association with this crypto.”
Posting three pictures, he showed discussions on the GUNIT memecoin from other members of the cryptocurrency community. An obvious rug-pull pattern can be seen in the data, which exhibit a rapid price increase followed by a fast decrease. According to Cointelegraph’s analysis of GUNIT memecoin transaction data on Dex Screener, a number of wallet addresses sold a sizable quantity of the token. Memecoin was promoted on the rapper’s X account, and after that, four accounts sold more than $100,000 of it.Consequently, according to 50 Cent, users had been duped out of almost $300 million—a sum that greatly exaggerates the profit that anonymous dealers received for the sale of GUNIT tokens. There had been $19.4 million worth of transactions in the token at the time of publishing.
The announcement is made in response to some celebrities who have recently been linked to cryptocurrency debuts. The industry was left perplexed by confusing messages when Caitlyn Jenner, one of the most recent celebrities to enter the memecoin space, launched her own token.After being originally discounted, rumors that her X account had been hacked started to circulate again. She was also protecting the JENNER token itself at the same moment. Jenner’s X account released a statement on May 27 asking fans to “send me some of your favourite memecoins,” according to Cointelegraph.
While she later took the post down, she doubled down on promoting JENNER.
“That ad for a third party token was taken down! As I have said from the beginning the only focus I have is $Jenner and the ad I posted confused too many people, and was not worth it. Like I had said time and time again I’m fully focused on my token $Jenner,” she posted on X.