Hackers used 50 Cent’s X account (formerly Twitter) and website to promote a fictitious cryptocurrency called $GUNIT.
“Get rich or die trying.” This is one of the posts that 50 Cent’s 12.9 million followers were able to see on X (formerly Twitter) on Friday, June 22. These messages, however, were not published by the rapper himself. As he explained, his account and website, Thisis50.com, were hacked to promote a fictitious cryptocurrency called $GUNIT.
“I have no connection with this cryptocurrency,” assured 50 Cent on X, adding that “Twitter quickly blocked his account” following the hack. If the rapper has since recovered his account on Elon Musk’s social network, his website is still unavailable for the moment.
A gain of 3,000,000 dollars
The hackers managed to make a lot of money with this scam, with 50 Cent initially mentioning the sum of $300,000,000 collected “in 30 minutes”, as reported by the American site Cointelegraph. The rapper then edited his post, lowering the amount to $3,000,000.
The hackers managed to recover such a sum of money using the “pump and dump” system. It consists of encouraging as many people as possible to invest in a cryptocurrency to increase its price as much as possible, before selling everything and pocketing the stake.
50 Cent is far from the first person whose notoriety has been used to promote a cryptocurrency. Scammers also use several methods to achieve their goal. Last March, several celebrities, such as Elise Lucet and Jamel Debbouze, saw their names used in fake sponsored press articles with outrageous titles on X and Facebook in order to promote cryptocurrencies.
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