Last week, Yi He became co-CEO of Binance. This week, hackers overtook her WeChat to pump and dump a memecoin.
Despite helming a company with a valuation in the tens of billions of dollars, the company’s security budget was unable to protect her social media account from a rudimentary takeover.
The hacker, according to one analyst, had a budget of just a few thousand dollars and was easily able to accumulate a large position in Mubarakah with a market capitalization beneath $2 million.
After benefitting from her unauthorized yet convincing WeChat endorsement, the hacker then sold shortly after the peak valuation near $5 million.
Neither Binance founder and ex-CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) nor Yi He have ever actually endorsed Mubarakah, which takes its name from the feminine spelling of one of CZ’s memecoins, Mubarak, as a memecoin.
CZ steps up for damage control
CZ, who has children with Yi He and co-manages funds of a family office with her, publicly apologized for the incident.
Without naming the memecoin to avoid drawing further attention to the otherwise worthless token, CZ mostly blamed WeChat for the failure.
“Web 2 social media security is not that strong,” he complained. “Stay safu!”
Read more: CZ lets memecoin traders fight it out for Broccoli dominance
Yi He uses passive voice to distance herself from responsibility
By 9:29pm New York time on Tuesday, Yi He tweeted about the WeChat hack.
The new Binance co-CEO didn’t bother to apologize. She simply stated in Chinese, “My WeChat was hacked.”
In a follow-up tweet, she used third-person and passive voice to refer to herself and her past actions. Begrudgingly, she explained the authentication loophole that granted the hacker access.
“WeChat was abandoned long ago, and the phone number was seized for use. It cannot be recovered at present.”
Conveniently, she now referred to “My WeChat” as simply “WeChat,” and “my phone number” as “the phone number.”
Those rhetorical tricks didn’t help recoup the financial losses of anyone who believed in the WeChat endorsement.
Any unlucky traders of that memecoin had already lost 45% from its peak by the time of her clarification. The coin also continued to decline in value after her post.
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