Scammers hacked the social media account of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former President, promoting a fake meme coin. The resulting BRAZIL token rose over 10,000% in a matter of minutes, netting the scammers over $1.3 million.
While he was in office, Bolsonaro did little to promote the crypto industry or associate himself with the community.
Would Bolsonaro Promote BRAZIL Meme Coin?
Crypto social media scams have grown in prominence this week, and one amusing example targeted Jair Bolsonaro. A local influencer reported that Bolsonaro’s social media account was hacked and used to promote BRAZIL, a sketchy meme coin.
The post was soon taken down, but the scammers nonetheless accumulated over $1.3 million. This follows a dark trend for political meme coins that emerged throughout the week.
“Bolsonaro’s official account on X (formerly Twitter) was hacked and they released a cryptocurrency called “BRAZIL”, which rose +10,000% in minutes! Be careful, don’t buy it. It’s a scam and Bolsonaro’s sons have already warned about it on their official profiles,” Berman claimed.
During his tenure as Brazil’s president, Bolsonaro was not an especially pro-crypto figure. He signed friendly regulations in the lame-duck session after his 2022 electoral defeat but did little else for the space.
However, under his successor’s tenure, financial regulators approved a Solana ETF and Brazil’s Central Bank partnered with Chainlink to create a CBDC.
All that is to say, it initially seems like a bizarre choice to target Bolsonaro for the meme coin scam. However, as Vitalik Buterin noted yesterday, political meme coins are rising dramatically in the space.
Since the US President launched his own TRUMP meme coin, scammers have identified a potentially lucrative trend. Recent polls have claimed that over 40% of TRUMP buyers were complete newbies in the crypto industry, and scammers made $857 million by exploiting them.
Additionally, a Filipino group created a fake XRP wallet that they claimed was linked to the US Treasury. President Trump’s meme coin has created an expectation that more celebrities or political figures will do the same.
That’s why investors are looking to leverage every new meme coin that emerges, but most end up losing money.
“The risk of politician coins comes from the fact that they are such a perfect bribery vehicle. If a politician issues a coin, you do not even need to send *them* any coins to give them money. Instead, you just buy and hold the coin, and this increases the value of their holdings passively,” Vitalik Buterin recently wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
Political meme coins were already creating unease in the crypto space, even when they were legitimate. If hackers continue using them for naked theft attempts, they could seriously stain the community’s reputation.
Scammers were able to successfully rug pull BRAZIL by hacking Bolsonaro, even though he has no real crypto affiliation. That is a particularly worrying sign.
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