Failed crypto scammers nominated for 'most incompetent hacker' award

An attempt to hijack several large accounts on X to promote a scam token has ended in failure and earned a nomination for the "Most Incompetent Hacker of the Year" award.

Late Wednesday evening (UTC), warnings surfaced that multiple prominent accounts on X, including People magazine (7.6 million followers), Brazilian football star Neymar Jr. (1.9 million), French footballer Alexandre Lacazette (1.5 million), director Oliver Stone (251,000), and others, were hacked to promote HACKED, a scam meme coin on the Solana (SOL) blockchain.

In their message, the hackers emphasized that "this account is hacked" and claimed they were trying to "pump it and make profits together."

However, the scheme didn’t go as planned. According to the prominent and pseudonymous blockchain sleuth ZachXBT, who appears to have been the first to sound the alarm, the scammers "likely lost money purchasing this method."

He estimated that the scammers made only $8,000 by gaining access to millions of X users while possibly spending "5-6 figures" on the method.

The analyst speculated that the hacked accounts may have granted permission to the same site or app, which aided the hackers. This serves as another reminder to revoke connected and unused apps in the X settings. This can be done as follows:

Settings and Privacy -> Security and account access -> Apps and sessions -> Connected apps, where you can revoke inactive apps.

Hacking large social media accounts is a popular tactic among crypto scammers to target victims. Unfortunately, some are more successful than the case described above.

For instance, as reported by Cybernews.com, two hacks of popular actors earlier this year resulted in a total scam profit of around $530,000. Additionally, convicted UK hacker Gurvinder Bhangu (Gurv) may be behind the recent hack of actress Sydney Sweeney's X account.