Greater than $500 million was misplaced to memecoin rug pulls and scams in 2024, in accordance with a report by crypto intelligence platform Merkle Science.
Probably the most prolific scams concerned social engineering, which is a method that depends on impersonation and manipulation to realize entry to somebody’s private knowledge – usually on this case celebrities or well-known tech figures.
Certainly one of these circumstances noticed scammers compromise French footballer Kylian Mbappe’s X account. As soon as they gained entry, a hyperlink was posted to a nefarious memecoin which rose to a $460 million market cap earlier than being rug pulled.
There was additionally a case involving music artist Wiz Khalifa that focused his 35.7 million followers on X. A faux WIZ token was promoted, rising to a $3.4 million market cap earlier than plummeting to zero.
“These scams aren’t simply opportunistic—they’re extremely coordinated operations that exploit belief at scale,” Robert Whitaker, director of regulation enforcement affairs at Merkle Science informed CoinDesk.
“Hackers are not simply breaching wallets or exchanges; they’re hijacking the credibility of celebrities and trade leaders to control markets in actual time. Our analysis reveals that meme coin rug pulls alone accounted for a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands in losses this yr, with platforms like X being the first battleground.”
Merkle Science’s report reveals that 75% of all assaults came about on X and 19% on YouTube. 44% of the reported social engineering scams resulted in rug pulls, whereas phishing assaults was additionally attributed to 44% of all scams.