Social media has once again become a battleground for crypto scammers. This time, the victim was the X account of famous model and entrepreneur Kylie Jenner, which was hacked to promote a fraudulent memecoin under the ticker KYLIE. The incident occurred amid a growing wave of attacks on celebrity accounts, and its consequences were striking: the token's market capitalization soared to nearly $1.19 million, then crashed by approximately 68%.
Attack on an audience of 39.5 million followers
The attackers published two posts from Jenner's account, which has 39.5 million followers, advertising the token. The first post contained a call to trade, while the second included a link to a profile allegedly associated with the Pump.fun platform, under the name cutekjenner, specifying the ticker and contract address. Both posts collectively garnered about 83,000 views before being removed. Attentive users quickly noticed the unnatural presentation and suspected a hack.
According to aggregator data, the token's market capitalization on PumpSwap peaked at $1.19 million, but by the time of analysis it had fallen to $378,500. The 24-hour trading volume reached $6.1 million, while liquidity held at $58,900. The token was distributed among approximately 3,700 holders.
A wave of clones and repetition of the scheme
After the posts were removed, several tokens with similar names appeared on Solana. One of them, featuring the same profile image, also briefly rose to a $1.04 million market cap, but the rest ranged from $29,800 to $370,300. Nearly all of them lasted no more than a few hours, confirming their complete lack of viability.
This is not the first time hacked accounts have been used to promote memecoins. In July, hackers attacked the SpaceX and Starlink accounts, earning about $125,000 on the SCATMAN token. Later, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev became a victim—the attacker gained approximately $1.2 million from the Vladhood token. Similar schemes were also applied to Senator Cynthia Lummis's account and to actor Dean Norris's post in January 2025.
My analysis: Such incidents are not just hacker attacks, but a systemic problem of trust within the crypto community. Until celebrities strengthen the security of their accounts and platforms implement stricter verification mechanisms, we will continue to see new waves of these scams. Investors should remember: any token promoted through hacked accounts is almost a guaranteed loss of funds.