Hacker exploits Truth Terminal founder’s X account, nets $600K by promoting a scam token

Truth Terminal’s founder, Andy Ayrey, had his account on the social media platform X hacked. The hacker posted a contract address for a token with the ticker IB, with the deployer account acquiring 12.5% of the token supply.

Due to the chatbot promoting the token, which is currently generating considerable hype in the crypto space, unsuspecting investors speculated on it, causing the token’s market cap to surge to over $25 million. During the process, the hacker profited by over $600,000, according to DEXScreener data .

This was followed by a large sell-off as the perpetrator liquidated holdings, causing prices to plunge nearly 98%, bringing the market cap down to $500,000. The token’s price has since rebounded, attributed to a “community takeover.”

As noted in a follow-up post, Ayrey temporarily regained control of his X account. He explained that the hacker accessed his account by targeting his mobile carrier, suggesting a SIM swap attack. However, the account still appears to be posting suspicious messages, suggesting it may still be compromised.

“Finally got back into my account. The hacker socially engineered my mobile carrier. Sorry about that.” Ayrey stated in an X post, which now appears to have been deleted. 

Truth Terminal gained much attention in the crypto community after becoming the first chatbot to amass holdings exceeding $1 million through its association with the “GOAT” memecoin and donations of other memecoins the chatbot appeared to have endorsed during user interactions.

Ayrey created Truth Terminal by training a custom version of Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus large language model using a corpus of his personal writing and data from social media sites, including 4chan, Reddit, and X. In July, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen granted $50,000 worth of bitcoin to the chatbot after interacting with it on X.