CAR's Memecoin Phishing Scandal: President's Coin Under Fire

The Central African Republic (CAR) memecoin has been making headlines, but not for the reasons its creators might have hoped. Instead of uniting people and supporting national development, as claimed by the official X account of President Faustin-Archange Touadéra, the memecoin has been plagued with phishing links on various information pages.

Cybersecurity experts have discovered that several cryptocurrency data aggregators listing the CAR memecoin direct users to phishing sites. The project's X account has been suspended, and its website is currently down. The Telegram group linked from major data providers like CoinGecko was found to contain malicious links, including a fake "Safeguard" bot identified as a phishing tool.

Phishing schemes tied to the CAR memecoin are not limited to Telegram. Malicious links have been found on several aggregators other than CoinGecko, including the trading platform GMGNAI. A suspicious link listed on GMGNAI led users to a fake CAPTCHA page that executed malicious code when interacted with.

Many cryptocurrency data aggregators allow community members to modify token-related information, raising security concerns. This function, often called "community takeover," can be updated with payment, and the security risks depend entirely on the review process. In the case of the CAR memecoin, the announcement posted from the X account of the president has sparked responses from other supposedly official accounts, including one claiming to belong to Félix Tshisekedi, the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Skepticism surrounding the legitimacy of the CAR memecoin has grown, with reports suggesting that the announcement promoting the token may be an AI-generated deepfake. The launch of the CAR memecoin follows the introduction of a memecoin associated with US President Donald Trump, which raised concerns about opportunistic scams.