Elon Musk was baited into a $80M memecoin trap – Here’s how

The crypto market is increasingly becoming uncontrollable in scams, with social engineering being one of the avenues. Recently, Elon Musk was baited into promoting a scam memecoin token, SLINK, linked to his company, Neuralink.

The memecoin token, Shivolink [SLINK], surged past $80 million in a few hours before crashing by over 95%. Here is how the events unfolded:

How Elon Musk was social engineered to promote SLINK

The X account of Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink executive who is also the mother of Elon Musk’s four children, was compromised. The hacker then made a post that did not make it obvious that it is a crypto project.

The post was an effective way to use social engineering to get Elon to react. However, Ryan Tanaka, a podcaster about Neuralink, said that someone hacked Shivon’s X account. He wrote,

This post below is very likely compromised.

But after Elon replied to the Neuralink post with an emoji, Ryan admitted he was wrong, which suggested Elon backed the project. As a result, the memecoin rallied aggressively.

However, this sudden rally did not last, as the aftermath proved it was a pump-and-dump scheme.

The post on Shivon’s account was deleted, leading to the coin crashing below $1 million in market cap. This confirmed Ryan’s original belief, and further investigations confirmed it. The Youtuber wrote,