NBA's Instagram Hijacked to Shill a Pump.fun Token That Rugged at $40K
The NBA's verified Instagram posted a fake "NBA Coin ($NBA)" on Solana. The token ran to roughly $40K in market cap, then one sell candle dumped it to $3.58K.
Hackers appear to have taken over the NBA's verified Instagram account late Wednesday and used it to promote a fake "NBA Coin ($NBA)" on Solana. The post, written in the style of a meme-coin launch, read "Where basketball passion meets blockchain innovation! 🚀 BUY NOW!" and gave a contract address ending in "pump", the suffix used by Pump.fun launches. The screenshot shows it had about 2.7K likes at the time it was captured, 29 minutes after it went up.
The NBA Instagram hack in numbers
Screenshots shared by @CryptoGorilla show the token climbing to roughly a $40,000 market cap before a single massive sell candle crashed it to about $3,580.
That's a strikingly small number for a takeover of one of the biggest sports accounts in the world, which is why @CryptoGorilla summed it up as "They hacked the NBA's IG only to rug it at $40k." The lesson is the same as always: no major league is going to launch a token through a random Instagram post, so treat any "official" coin drop from a celebrity or brand account as compromised until it's verified elsewhere. More crypto news and all news.
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