Breaking Bad’s Dean Norris’ X account hacked to promote $8m crypto scam

Breaking Bad actor Dean Norris says his account was hacked to promote DEAN meme coins, which reached a market cap of more than $8 million.

On Jan. 25, Dean Norris’ crypto account was hacked to promote a meme coin created in his likeness, DEAN, taking advantage of the actor’s celebrity status as part of a pump and dump scheme.

The hackers used a photoshopped picture of Norris holding a notepad showing “$DEAN” and the launch date, leading users to believe Norris had launched his own meme coin and was promoting it on his social media.

When asked for more proof, the hackers prepared a video of Norris seemingly confirming the token’s launch on Jan. 25.

“Hey it’s me Dean, and uh… January 25th, I’m declaring it’s real,” said the actor in a five second clip.

On Jan. 26th, the Breaking Bad actor came online to clarify that his X account was hacked to “sell crypto stuff.” After recovering his account, he posted a video clarifying that his account was hacked to promote a crypto scam.

“This is Dean Norris actually, and that whole crazy crypto sh*t was a complete fake scam. I was hacked and I don’t know, I just got it back,” said Norris, thanking the platform for helping him restore access to the account.

He then told users to ignore “whatever that was,” but the damage had been done.

According to data from DEX Screener, the DEAN token promoted on the actor’s page had reached a market cap as high as $8.4 million on Jan. 25. Since the video was posted by Norris, its market cap has fallen so far from its peak that it sits at only $57,000.

In the past 24 hours of trading, DEAN has gone down by nearly 76%. The token’s trading volume stands at $263,000 while its liquidity is at $46,000. The Solana (SOL)-based meme coin is currently trading hands at $0.0456. Traders are mass dumping the DEAN token, with only five buy orders in the past hour out of the dozens of sell orders pouring in. On the chart, the token’s value has been flat-lining for the past 12 hours.

In a separate post, Dean Norris calls out people on Reddit who accused him of launching a crypto token and using it to “pump and dump” the tokens for a profit.

“I clicked on a couple accounts accusing me of lying and looks like THEY were the people pumping it up!!” said Norris, adding that he does not own a Telegram account, and that he rarely uses his X account.