The president of the Central African Republic (CAR), Faustine-Archange Touadéra has said that his launch of the $CAR memecoin was legitimate and that he has not been a victim of a hack.

Instead, he said the memecoin was debuted as an experiment to create a community and raise funds to support the country’s development.

Dive deeper

  • In a social media post on Wednesday afternoon, Touadéra declared that he was neither hacked nor had his likeness been ‘deepfaked’ in the video he initially posted.
  • A spokesperson for his office confirmed this to the French publication, T1Info, saying that the video published was real and had only been translated to English to address an international audience.
  • Touadéra launched $CAR on Sunday night and announced it on social media, initially to wide acclaim.
  • However, a closer look at this announcement sparked fears that his page may have been hacked and used to promote the memecoin, a common tactic employed by crypto scammers.
  • The video itself failed a test conducted by Mariblock to determine whether it was real or generated by artificial intelligence.

Zoom in

  • Social media pages of celebrities hacked to promote fraudulent memecoin schemes are not new and have spiked in recent months.
  • Shortly after Touadéra launched $CAR, an X account posing to be the president of the Republic of Congo, Felix Tshisekedi launched a token dubbed $CONGO.
  • Shortly after the launch, the creator rug-pulled investors and has since deleted the account.
  • Other celebrities such as Kylian Mbappe, Drake, Lara and Tiffany Trump have fallen victim to such scams.

Zoom out