McDonald's suddenly hacked after its stock price surged by more than 155% in 30 minutes

FX168 Financial News Agency (Asia Pacific) reported that McDonald’s official Instagram account was hacked on Wednesday (August 21), and the fast food giant’s social media was used to promote and sell a meme coin called Grimace, stealing $700,000 from the US blue chip public chain Solana.

According to screenshots shared on Twitter (now renamed X), McDonald's Instagram page published a series of posts promoting a fake meme coin based on the fast food chain's purple mascot Grimace.

Multiple posts described the fake meme coin as "McDonald's experiment with Solana" and blasted its 5.1 million followers worldwide.

Chain detective ZachXBT revealed that the market value of the GRIMACE token plummeted after rising to $25 million in thirty minutes and currently plummeted to about $639,000.

Source: Telegram

CoinTelegraph reported that according to the blockchain analysis service Bubblemaps data, the hacker first used the Solana meme coin deployer pump.fun to snap up 75% of the total circulating supply of Grimace tokens, and then divided it into about 100 different wallets.

According to DexScreener data, after the McDonald's official account posted the post, the value of the GRIMACE meme coin rose from a market value of several thousand dollars to $25 million in 30 minutes.

As the hacker sold the tokens he held, the token price also plummeted. Within 40 minutes, the market value of GRIMACE fell to $650,000.

Source: DexScreener

Bubblemaps said the hackers made a total of about $700,000 in Solana.

After the attack, the hackers also edited the bio section of McDonald's page to brag about their exploits and revealed that they had netted a total of $700,000 from the theft.

"Sorry my friend, you have just been scammed by India_X_Kr3w, thank you for the $700,000 in Solana," the hacker wrote.

Currently, the post promoting the GRIMACE meme coin and the profile has now been deleted and restored to normal.

McDonald's told the New York Post in a statement that it was aware of an "isolated incident" that affected its social media accounts on August 21.

"We have resolved the issues with these accounts and apologize for any offensive language posted by our fans during this period," McDonald's said.