Social engineering crypto scams mainly targeted celebrities in 2024, analysts say

Cryptographic scams motivated by social engineering soaked in 2024, analysts warning that crooks are increasingly targeting celebrities and technology chiefs.

In a February 11 research reportAnalysts of the Merkle Science Blockchain Judicial Society revealed that in 2024, crook targeted high -level figures by pishing their accounts. After accessing, they quickly favored the false launches of tokens created on pump.fun, a platform for the strike of tokens Solara.

One of these incidents was the August 29 hack of the X account of the football star Kylian Mbappé. The striker has promoted a false piece of Mbappe on Solana, who quickly reached a market capitalization of $ 460 million before collapsing and leaving investors with more than a million dollars in losses.

“By compromising influential figures and trust platforms, pirates use credibility to manipulate large -scale investors.”

Merkle Science

In total, the company whose headquarters is New York identified 36 cases of these scams last year. Celebrities were the most targeted cohort, representing 33% of cases, indicates the report. Technological figures and technological companies have followed, representing 30% and 19% of cases respectively. Government agencies and consumer brands were rarely affected, each representing only 5% of incidents. On average, the victims had 2.3 million followers, notes the company.

Most attacks took place on X because the social network represented 75% of all cases. YouTube represented 19% and officials of official websites for 5%, with crooks using tactics such as phishing links and the bypass of two -factor authentication, according to Merkle Science. The two main types of scams were prints and phishing, both representing 88% of all attacks linked to the crypto which occurred in 2024.