More than $ 500 million were lost in Memecoin Rug Pulls and scams in 2024, according to a Crypto Intelligence Platform Merkle Science report.
The most prolific scams involved social engineering, which is a technique that is based on supplantation and manipulation to obtain access to someone’s personal data, often in this case known technological celebrities or figures.
One of these cases saw the scammers compromise the account of the French footballer Kylian Mbappe. Once they got access, a link to a disastrous Memecoin was published that increased to a market capitalization of $ 460 million before being taken out of carpet.
There was also a case that involved the musical artist Wiz Khalifa who went to his 35.7 million followers in X. A false Wiz Token was promoted, increasing to a market limit of $ 3.4 million before stinging zero.
“These scams are not just opportunists: they are highly coordinated operations that exploit the confidence on scale,” Robert Whitaker, director of Affairs for Application of Merkle Science’s law.
“Computer pirates are no longer violating wallets or exchanges; they are kidnapping the credibility of celebrities and industry leaders to manipulate markets in real time. Our research shows that the carpet of meme coins represents only hundreds of millions of millions of millions of millions Losses this year, with platforms like X being the main battlefield. “
Merkle Science’s report reveals that 75% of all attacks took place in X and 19% on YouTube. 44% of the informed social engineering scams resulted in carpets, while phishing attacks were also attributed to 44% of all scams.
