‘Try Harder Hackers’ — Hoskinson Says After Hacked Cardano Foundation’s X Account Posts Fake Token, Impending SEC Lawsuit

Bad actors compromised the Cardano Foundation’s X account on Dec. 8 to promote a phony Solana token. In a later post, they shared a false announcement claiming that the company would cease its support for Cardano’s native ADA token due to a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The hacked X account was on Sunday first used to announce a token dubbed $ADASOL, a Solana-based token that was allegedly “Cardano, reimagined for Solana’s speed and innovation.”

In the 13-part thread, the hackers explained $ADASOL’s goal, citing genuine resources, including the Cardano Foundation’s website and a recent podcast episode that supposedly discussed the token.

$ADASOL generated roughly $500,000 in trading volume before crashing by 99% as traders realized it was a scam token.

The post was deleted an hour later when the Cardano Foundation account posted another false announcement. The new post warned the Cardano community this time that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had unleashed a lawsuit against the Swiss non-profit. 

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“In light of this unexpected legal action, we have made the difficult decision to immediately cease all support towards the $ADA token to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements,” the fraudulent notice reads in part.

At press time, both the $ADASOL scam token post and the subsequent bogus notice of imminent SEC lawsuit had been removed. Typically, such news tends to impact tokens in the ever-volatile crypto market negatively. Still, the price of Cardano’s ADA remained unfazed as Cardano creator Charles Hoskinson quickly dispelled the misinformation.

“Looks like the CF account got hacked. Try harder hackers,” Hoskinson posited.

ADA was valued at $1.18 as of press time, a 1% drop on the day according to CoinGecko data as the Cardano Foundation is working to fix the compromised account.

“The Cardano Foundation X account @Cardano_CF has been compromised,” the company announced on its LinkedIn page. “Please ignore any posts from the account at this time while we address this. Thank you.”