One of the biggest credit card companies' Facebook accounts was hacked yesterday to promote a fraudulent memecoin, $VISA.

Speculations is going around that the so-called could be someone inside of Visa-an intern maybe-who came out with this nifty plan to earn a quick buck by hacking into the company's social media account to promote a coin he created.

A promise of the token fulfilled 14 years later

On January 27, 2025, Visa posted on its social media account claiming the release of a new token, just as they promised 14 years ago.

They then revealed that this token is called $VISA. The person behind the post also left the name of the wallet, 97bR1cWyHXXSbPhg6eZkBGwwdKTV5ru1oJbNrXoopump.

Amazingly, many fell for the the scam as the price of token spiked temporarily before crashing; a telltale signature of a rug-pull scam where developers liquidate their entire holdings, causing the price to crater.

A trading chart on GMGN.AI illustrates the token’s volatility, showing a sharp price spike to 6 million, followed by a steep decline and subsequent stabilization. As of now, $VISA is trading at 0.53282, down 2.68%, with 3.463K trades recorded during the incident.

Just two hours after the post went online, it vanished. Some users are also questioning why it took Visa a whole two hours to remove the fraudulent post, and should the company be partially responsible because of their lackluster response and their poor handling of the situation.

One user on X claimed that Visa should exercise social responsibility and remunerate users with the money that they lost from the scam.

"Corporate responsibility isn't realy unless y our force them pay for it, send the $VISA CTO parabolic so this get fucking exposure."

Work of an intern

While this is just purely speculative, but some netizens have speculated that this entire scam could have a work of a Visa intern. This is a speculation that is not totally implausible, given the different circumstances leading to the scam.

Indeed, it does make sense that only a person from the inside would get access to all the company's vital information and access to the company's social media handle. This is especially true if the intern was working under the blockchain or innovation department, where he would get enough access to launch or exploit a project under Visa's name.

This could also explain why the company took so long before they removed the social media post. Furthermore, reputable companies like Visa often has strict internal controls which scrutinizes all of the ongoing projects, hence it would be unlikely that a person from the outside would be able to bypass all those securities. Hence, it would be more likely that something like this could be orchestrated from someone from the inside. 

Solana platform abused to commit fraud

This is not the first time a corporate social media account of a big company has been compromised to promote a scam crypto scheme.

There is also a common demonitator among all these scams-which is that many of these rug pull scams are created on the same website,Pump.fun. For this reason, many have accused Pump.fun for supporting these scams, which the company has been widely criticised for so long.

A report indicates that out of the platform's 14 million users, 0.4% generated profits of $10,000 and above, while the rest incurred losses.

Law firm Burwick has submitted a lawsuit against Pump.fun, claiming that the company is preying on investors. The company says that Pump.fun works like a pyramid scheme, and the lawsuit may be followed by more legal proceedings against the platform.