Cryptocurrency hackers claimed they broke into McDonald’s official Instagram account and used it to promote a fake digital currency — making off with $700,000 in stolen money.
A screenshot circulating online shows the McDonald’s Instagram page showing its caption changed to: “Sorry mah n–ga you have just been rug pulled by India_X_Kr3w thank you for the $700,000 in Solana.”
The caption, which was visible to the more than 5.1 million Instagram followers of McDonald’s account, included an emoji depicting the flag of India.
McDonald’s said in a statement it was “aware of an isolated incident that impacted our social media accounts earlier today.”
“We have resolved the issue on those accounts and apologize to our fans for any offensive language posted during that time,” McDonald’s said.
In the parlance of cryptocurrency, a “rug pull” is a type of scam in which creators of a cryptocurrency withdraw funds from a coin’s liquidity pool and disappear — leaving investors with tokens that are worthless.
A “rug pull” is normally executed by creating the fake token and then aggressively promoting it on social media and cryptocurrency forums online.
The creators build hype around the digital coin and encourage investors to get in on the ground floor before its value skyrockets.
When enough liquidity has been amassed by pairing the fake coin with more established cryptocurrencies such as ethereum, the creators withdraw the liquidity, causing the value to plummet to zero.
The scammers then delete the social media accounts and remove their online presence — making it difficult for investors to track them down so that they can recover their money.
The hackers claim they targeted McDonald’s social media account and used it to promote a fake meme coin known as “GRIMACE” on the Solana network — a high-performance blockchain platform designed for decentralized cryptocurrencies.
Within 30 minutes, the fake token went from zero to $25 million in value before crashing, according to the news site Cryptopolitan.
Guillaume Huin, a senior marketing director for McDonald’s, appeared to have his account hacked as well.
His social media pages on X and Instagram included posts promoting the fake coin — one of which referred to “a McDonald’s experiment on Solana.”
The posts promoting the fake cryptocurrency were later deleted.
Grimace is the large purple character created by McDonald’s as part of the fast food chain’s marketing and advertising campaign.
New York Mets baseball fans who are superstitious about their team note that ever since Grimace threw out the ceremonial first pitch before the June 12 game against the Miami Marlins, the club turned its season around — going from a losing record to playoff contention.