McDonald’s Instagram hacked to promote cryptocurrency scam featuring Grimace

The official Instagram account of McDonald’s Corp. was reportedly hacked today to promote a cryptocurrency scam named after the McDonald’s character Grimace.

Those behind the hack changed the biography on the McDonald’s Instagram page and also made posts in relation to the cryptocurrency scam. The McDonald’s bio was charged to a message that included a reference to a rug pull and the obtaining of $700,000 in Solana cryptocurrency, accompanied by an Indian flag, while posts included a message “a McDonald’s experiment on Soluna” along with a cryptocurrency address.

A rug pull, in cryptocurrency parlance, is a type of scam where developers create a new token, inflate its value through hype and then suddenly withdraw all the liquidity, leaving investors with worthless tokens. The scam often leads to significant financial losses for those who invested in the project.

In the case of the targeting of the McDonald’s account, the scammers managed to drive up the market cap of GRIMACE tokens to $20 million before they fell to below $1 million once the scam was exposed. The reference to the $700,000 left in the McDonald’s bio before the account was restored suggests that those behind the scam managed to net themselves $700,000 from it.

According to The Block, the GRIMACE token was generated on a service called “Pump.fun,” which launched in January and allows users to create meme coins on the Solana blockchain. More than 1.8 million meme coins have reportedly been created on the platform since the beginning of the year.

In response to the scam, a spokesperson for McDonald’s said the fast food giant was “aware of an isolated incident that impacted our social media accounts earlier today” and that “we have resolved the issue on those accounts and apologize to our fans for any offensive language posted during that time.”

Discussing the scam and hack of the account, Steve Graham, senior vice president of head of North America of cyberthreat training group EC-Council, told SiliconANGLE via email that the incident serves as yet another reminder that global giants such as McDonald’s are vulnerable to cyberthreats, regardless of which industry they operate in.

“The speed and scale at which this situation unfolded emphasize the critical need for organizations to invest in cybersecurity measures and training,” Graham added. “Businesses must equip their employees with the know-how to spot and avoid scams to prevent the financial and reputational loss often associated with these types of incidents.”

Image: SiliconANGLE/Ideogram