Hacker hijacked SpaceX and Starlink X accounts to promote meme coin SCATMAN, netting $135K before the token crashed.
Ecosystem ·
A hacker gained control of the X accounts belonging to SpaceX and Starlink, using them to advertise a meme coin called SCATMAN that briefly achieved a $2 million valuation before collapsing. The attacker created 10 trillion tokens and liquidated them in two transactions: the first yielded 59 ETH (worth roughly $108,000), and a subsequent sale of 59.28 million tokens generated an additional 14.7 ETH (approximately $27,000), totaling around $135,000 in profit. Both companies deleted the fraudulent posts and regained access to their compromised accounts after the incident.
Account breaches used to promote low-cap tokens have emerged as a recurring pattern across the crypto industry. Previous incidents include the compromise of accounts belonging to Scroll co-founder Ye Chen, Pepe creator Matt Furie, and gaming software company WinRAR, each exploited to push various scam tokens. The most significant breach resulted in more than $600,000 in losses within thirty minutes, though the material does not confirm all such takeovers resulted in comparable financial damage.
The extent of coordination between account access and token development remains unclear. Likewise unconfirmed is whether law enforcement has traced the attacker's identity or whether additional assets remain under their control.