Dean Norris, famed for his role in Breaking Bad, has once again been targeted by hackers. His X account was recently breached to promote a fraudulent meme coin named DEAN.
### Details from the Exploit
An X user captured screenshots of the deleted posts and described the incident as one of the “most believable” scams they had seen on the platform. The attack started with a misleading tweet from Norris’s official account, falsely announcing the launch of his cryptocurrency. The post claimed, “I have decided to launch my own crypto coin named Dean,” and provided a contract address for the fake token. To lend credibility to the scam, the hackers shared a photoshopped image of Norris holding a notepad with the token’s launch date and the ticker symbol “$DEAN.” They also released a manipulated video showing Norris seemingly confirming the launch date. In the brief clip, he says, “Hey, it’s me, Dean, and uh… January 25th, I’m declaring it’s real.” It was later uncovered that the criminals used Cameo, a service where users pay for personalized video messages, to create this deceptive clip.
On January 26, Norris regained control of his account and posted a video addressing the hack: “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.” Unfortunately, by that time, several victims had already acted on the fake announcement. Blockchain data from DEX Screener showed that the DEAN token’s market cap had soared to $8.4 million on January 25 but subsequently fell to $53,000. Despite his efforts to clear his name, many in the community criticized him for supposedly facilitating the hackers’ deception with what they believed was his official Telegram channel, “DeanNorrisofficial.”
In a later statement, the actor clarified that he doesn’t own a Telegram account, seldom uses X, and was unaware of the hack. He also refuted allegations on Reddit that claimed he initiated the coin for a “pump and dump” scheme.
### A Pattern of Targeting Celebrities
This incident marks the second time that Norris’s account has been exploited. In September 2024, his social media profile was used to promote another fake token, SCHRADER, based on his Breaking Bad character and hosted on the TRON blockchain. This earlier incident was part of a more extensive hacking spree discovered by blockchain investigator ZachXBT in November, involving up to 15 popular accounts on X and Instagram, including those of singer Usher and rapper Wiz Khalifa. Hackers used these accounts to promote counterfeit meme coins on the Pump.fun platform, collectively stealing up to $3.5 million.
Earlier in the year, several accounts belonging to major crypto firms, including Litecoin, Foresight Ventures, and Holoworld AI, were compromised and leveraged to promote scam tokens. In a more recent similar incident, hackers took over Nasdaq’s X account to promote a fake meme coin called STONKS, causing its market cap to rise to $80 million before crashing it.
