Add Robinhood Markets (HOOD) to the list of parties affected by crypto fraud, the online brokerage’s social media profile on Wednesday touted the launch of RBH, a new scam token on the BNB chain. The crypto ecosystem was quick to determine that Robinhood’s social accounts with 1.6 million followers on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook were hacked, and that the RBH token launched on Binance Smart Chain was a fraudulent crypto project.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said the situation “looks like a Robinhood account was hacked,” and emphasized the importance of critical thinking when evaluating token promotions on the BNB chain. According to BscScan, while Robinhood’s tweet has since been deleted, 61 addresses still hold RBH at press time, and $16,335 worth of wrapped BNB has been transferred in exchange for “new” tokens in PancakeSwap’s liquidity pool currency.
"Based on our ongoing investigation, we believe the source of the incident was a third-party vendor," Robinhood said in a statement after discovering unauthorized posts on its social media profiles.
While the amount of money lost is still relatively low compared to large-scale hacks that will occur in 2022 $325 million from the Wormhole Bridge attack and $200 million from the Nomad Bridge exploit were two of them these efforts may continue.
This is not the first time Binance has had to warn about a hack targeting its users. About 12 percent of all BEP-20 tokens, the standard token on the BNB chain are linked to scams, according to cryptocurrency risk monitoring firm Solidus Labs.
Additionally, when trading between packages BNB (wBNB) and RBH on PancakeSwap, a cryptocurrency exchange built on the BNB chain, where users are warned that RBH tokens come from “unknown sources” and are “high risk” before executing trades.
Scam started when a Binance hot wallet holding $19.6 million in various tokens sent approximately $1,000 (Tx1 and Tx2) worth of BNB (Binance’s native token) to the scammers. Afterwards, the scammers made several test transactions to create BEP-20 tokens (Tx3, Tx4) and add liquidity to PancakeSwap pools (Tx5, Tx6), and then triggered a transaction to mint 100 million RBH tokens to their address .
The scammer then activated a transaction to add 100 million RBH tokens and 3.1 wrapped BNB tokens as liquidity to the PancakeSwap liquidity pool.
The fraud came to a head when Robinhood posted on its social media accounts the launch of the scam token, which boosted sales of a liquidity pool consisting of two assets: wBNB and RBH.
