Animoca Brands Co-Founder Yat Siu Falls Victim to X Account Hack, Promotes Fake ANIMOCA Token

Animoca Brands’ co-founder and executive chairman, Yat Siu, recently fell victim to a hacking incident that promoted a fake token named ANIMOCA.

Animoca Brands co-founder and executive chairman Yat Siu has fallen victim to a hacking incident, which saw the promotion of a fake token named ANIMOCA. The incident began when the hacker managed to gain access to Siu’s official X account and used it to post about Animoca launching a new token.

The post quickly caused the price of the fake ANIMOCA token, which was created on the pump.fun platform, to spike by 500% in just five minutes. However, the surge was short-lived, as the hacker deleted the post, causing the token’s price to drop.

Animoca Brands confirmed the hack and urged investors to refrain from engaging with Siu’s account, while Siu himself followed up with a post revealing that the attacker had managed to bypass his two-factor authentication (2FA) security. He added that he had reported the issue to X’s support team.

Siu also promised to share insights about the security breach and expose vulnerabilities within X’s platform, while Animoca Brands reassured the community that no official token or NFT launch is planned. They also clarified that the hacker’s claims of a Solana-based token launch were entirely false.

The company remains one of Web3’s leading investors, with a portfolio that includes Yuga Labs, Axie Infinity, and Polygon. This latest hack follows a similar incident in December, where scammers managed to steal $100,000 through a fake CLAUDE token after hacking Anthropic’s X account.

The growing number of such attacks highlights the continued presence of access control vulnerabilities in the crypto world, which resulted in losses of over $1.9 billion in 2024 alone.