Robinhood CEO’s X account hacked in apparent memecoin scam

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev's X account was hacked on Thursday, with the attackers posting a promotion for a fake memecoin called "VLAD" along with what appeared to be a malicious token contract address. The post quickly garnered over 175,000 views before users flagged it as a scam and warned others against interacting with the token. The hack was reported by onchain data provider Onchain Lens, and the fraudulent token's contract address has since been marked as a scam by Robinhood Chain's blockchain explorer.

Robinhood confirmed the breach through its official Robinhood Comms X account, stating they were working with X (formerly Twitter) to restore access and had removed the malicious post. Subsequent reports from the onchain monitor MLM indicate that the hackers exploited approximately 650 Ether (ETH), valued between $1.2 million and $1.3 million. Blockchain analyst Wu Blockchain also shared these findings.

An online investigator known as Jeff claimed to have identified a wallet address linked to the hacker group. He reported that the wallet spent $126.81 to buy 47.2 million VLAD tokens and estimated that the current value of this holding indicated an unrealized profit of about $159,000. This incident highlights ongoing security challenges in the crypto sector, where phishing and other scams remain prevalent despite a recent decline in the total value lost to crypto scams, as noted by Nominis.