No Animoca Brands Solana Token, Company Warns Amid Chairman’s X Account Hack

Animoca Brands denies claims to introduce Solana-based token as speculation mounts following recent hack.

Middle the latest market euphoria and Christmas cheer, bad actors seek to profit by robbing unsuspecting crypto users of their hard-earned assets. In the latest case, these bad actors targeted successors of well-known crypto venture capital firm Animoca Brands.

No Solana token

In particular, Animoca Brands has warned followers that they are not launching any official token or NFT. The company emphasized this on Thursday 26 December X post disavowing a now-deleted pinned post by its chairman, Yat Siu.

The deleted post claimed that Animoca Brands was partnering with Pump.fun to launch a token with the ticker MOCA Solanashares a link that users can purchase.

However, according to Animoca Brands, this post came from a hacker who had managed to compromise Yat Sius’ X account. The firm noted that it would release an update after account recovery.

The exploit comes amid recent excitement around the Moca Network, which also uses the MOCA ticker. Moca Network is a decentralized interoperable ecosystem built on Layer Zero and supported by Animoca Brands. Over the last seven days, MOCA, the original token of this ecosystem, has increased by 142%.

A phishing attack

While Animoca Brands has yet to offer information on how Siu was affected by the hack, prominent crypto speculator ZachXBT have argued that the company’s co-founder likely fell victim to a phishing email scam by a hacker who has stolen approximately $500,000 in the past month from 15 other similar businesses, including The Arena and Brett.

According to ZachXBT, this hacker typically impersonates himself The X Team to warn of a non-existent copyright infringement and trick unsuspecting users into following a phishing link to enter their password or two-factor authentication code. After getting these details, they proceed to launch the meme coin scam using the X account.

The latest exploit is another example that highlights the need for greater security awareness among founders and projects in the crypto space. ZachXBT points out that Siu could have prevented the hack if he had used a hardware security key.