Animoca Brands denies claims of launching a Solana-based token as speculation mounts following a recent hacker attack.

In the middle the recent market euphoria And during the holidays, criminals try to rob unsuspecting crypto users of their hard-earned assets. In the most recent case, these criminals targeted followers of the well-known crypto venture capital firm Animoca Brands.

Not a Solana token

Notably, Animoca Brands has warned its followers that it is not launching an official token or NFT. The company emphasized this a Thursday, December 26th X post He disavows a now-deleted pinned post by his chairman Yat Siu.

The deleted post claimed that Animoca Brands had collaborated with Pump.fun to launch a token with the ticker MOCA SolanaSharing a link that allows users to purchase.

However, according to Animoca Brands, this post came from a hacker who managed to compromise Yat Siu’s X account. The company said it would release an update after the account was restored.

The exploit comes amid recent excitement surrounding Moca Network, which also uses the MOCA ticker. Moca Network is a decentralized interoperable ecosystem built on Layer Zero and powered by Animoca Brands. In the last seven days, MOCA, the native token of this ecosystem, has increased by 142%.

A phishing attack

While Animoca Brands has yet to provide any information about how Siu suffered from the hack, prominent crypto detective ZachXBT argued that the company’s co-founder was likely the victim of a phishing email scam by a hacker who stole about $500,000 last month through 15 other similar exploits, including The Arena and Brett.

According to ZachXBT, this hacker usually poses as an attacker X-Team warns of non-existent copyright infringement and tricks unsuspecting users into following a phishing link to enter their password or two-factor authentication code. After getting these details, they start meme coin scams using the X account.

The latest exploit is another example of the importance of greater security awareness among founders and projects in the crypto space. ZachXBT emphasizes that Siu could have prevented the hack if he had used a hardware security key.