The crypto industry is becoming prone to scammers, fraudsters, and bad actors. In the most recent development, it has been reported that the official X account of Dean Morris, the famous actor in Breaking Bad has been hijacked by malicious actors to advertise a bogus memecoin.
In the post from Dean’s account on Sunday, January 26, 2025 hackers posted that, “ I have decided to launch my own memecoin named as $DEAN, with a contact address.” The post also includes an image of Dean Morris with a notepad in front mentioning $DEAN.
Following the post from his account, the market of $DEAN saw an unprecedented jump reaching $7 million, and when Dean himself came in front stating that the particular memecoin is a scam leading to an average crash of 91%.
Experts argue that in just a couple of trading hours, the bogus $DEAN token succeeded in making millions from tiny investments, looting innocent investors. The hacks of X and Instagram .p;accounts of known personalities have become a new trend among hackers and malicious actors intending to make a profit from defrauding crypto enthusiasts.
X becoming the top choice of bad actors to loot Crypto enthusiasts
Chainalysis report underlines that X has seen a sharp rise in scam reports in recent months, making it a hotspot for crypto fraudulent activities The report goes on to note that most crypto scams targeted crypto enthusiasts and wiped out over $100 million in the year just after global pandemic.
As the Kaspersky report notes, more than 70 percent of illicit and fraudulent activity takes place on X, making it the most popular platform for crypto scammers, more than 46k people reported losing more than $1 billion to crypto scams on X, argues the Federal Trade Commission.
Ads with scam links may not be visible to all users because X, like the majority of other social media platforms, displays ads as per users’ interests. Bleeping Computer report notes that the quantity of ads containing scams has grown to the point where users are writing community notes alerting others to the fact that they are scams or wallet drainers.
Crypto market price updates
When writing the cryptocurrency market capitalization was $3.33 trillion with an intraday decline of 7.70 percent at the same time the trading volume grew by 63 percent reaching $130.35 billion, indicating a powerful dominance of bears over bulls.
In the same time frame, Bitcoin fell below the mark of $100k with an unprecedented bleeding of 6.60 percent. With BTC, Ethereum, XRP, Solana, BNB, and Dogecoin lost a significant amount of their trading prices.
According to CoinMarketCap, the intraday gainers list has been ruled by Jupiter(JUP) which grew 4.44 percent reaching $0.9718 closely followed by AIOZ Network and MANTRA (OM).
Yet at the same, the loser list has been ruled by Fartcoin, Official Trump, Pepe, Gala, and Gate tokens. The press time dominance of Bitcoin was 58.3 percent followed by Ethereum with 11 percent and 30 percent is dominated by other tokens.
