Truth about Ramaphosa cryptocurrency and hacked Parliament accounts

A cryptocurrency scammer recently launched a Ramaphosa memecoin and promoted it by hacking into the South African Parliament’s social media accounts.

In a statement released on Saturday, Parliament explained that the attacker breached one of its 25 YouTube streaming services, which is integrated with its official social media accounts.

Therefore, the attacker was able to upload a video promoting the memecoin to Parliament’s official YouTube channel and have that automatically posted to Twitter/X and Facebook.

Some reports suggested the memecoin was created earlier in March, while another stated that it was created in January.

However, both these claims are inaccurate.

Following the link provided in the YouTube video pointed to a crypto token listing on website called Pump.fun. The token has a contract address on the Solana blockchain of J6ijumP3bbonCY7AE4z51xfDAs2DUGoUk4jGpWtqpump.

As the name suggests, Pump.fun is a service for creating crypto tokens with the goal of perpetrating pump-and-dump scams.

In traditional finance, pump-and-dump is a form of fraud that involves artificially inflating the price of an asset through false or misleading positive statements, “pumping up” the price.

Fraudsters perpetrating the scam already own some of the asset. As the price increases, they sell the stock or token for a much higher price than they bought it at.

“Dumping” the overvalued asset causes its price to plummet, and investors who were duped into buying it lose their money.

In this case, the misleading statements being made to “pump” the token were the suggestions that it was officially released by the South African government.

Looking at the contract address details and the chart on Pump.fun shows that this fake Ramaphosa coin was created on 15 March 2025 at 06:26 in the morning.

Immutable metadata linked to the token shows that it linked to Parliament’s official YouTube and Twitter/X accounts from the beginning.

This suggests the person who created the token had likely already hacked into Parliament’s YouTube account — or knew they could — before creating the coin.

“Parliament has identified a security breach affecting one of its 25 YouTube streaming services, which is integrated with its official social media accounts,” it said in a statement on Saturday.

“This breach resulted in the unauthorised upload of content not aligned with the work of the Institution.”

Parliament said its digital team immediately intervened to terminate the compromised video stream.

“While a full investigation is underway to determine the source of the breach, additional safeguards are being put in place to strengthen the integrity of our digital infrastructure,” Parliament said.

“Parliament’s multiple YouTube streaming services provide real-time, unfiltered access to committee meetings and House sittings, which ensures broad public engagement through integration with social media platforms,” it explained.

“This expanded digital reach enhances public involvement and openness, as mandated by the Constitution, but also increases cybersecurity risks, which require continuous monitoring and reinforced security measures.”

Inaccurate reports

Other reports about the hack of Parliament’s YouTube channel have said that the Ramaphosa memecoin had been created weeks or months earlier.

They appear to have been misled by another Ramaphosa memecoin on the Solana blockchain that comes up in searches on popular crypto price tracking platforms like CoinGecko and CoinMarketcap.

However, that is not the same memecoin as the one that was being promoted by Saturday’s attacker.

It appears as though this older memecoin was launched on 22 January 2025 — the same day Cointelegraph editor Gareth Jenkinson published an interview with President Cyril Ramaphosa, where he said he would not launch his own memecoin.

His response to Jenkinson had a jovial and light-hearted tone.

“No, you are not going to see a Ramaphosa Bitcoin or whatever. I’m not that ambitious to be able to want to see my face on some coin,” the President said.