Every few years the internet relearns the same lesson: a blue checkmark is a lock on the front door, not a guard dog. The most recent refresher came on Thursday, August 21, 2025, when the Instagram accounts of Adele, Future, Tyla and the late Michael Jackson all posted the same picture within a short window. It was not a surprise collaboration. It was a crypto scam, and the con lasted about as long as the posts did.
What actually went up on those accounts
The image was an AI rendering of Future holding an oversized coin stamped “FREEBANDZ”, which is the name of his record label and clothing line. That borrowed name was the whole trick. A fan who saw it on Future’s own page, then again on Adele’s, could be forgiven for thinking something official was happening. Decrypt and Yahoo Finance reported there was no evidence that Future or his brand had anything to do with the token. Rolling Stone also listed Pink Floyd’s account among those that posted the image.
Here is my read: the hackers did not pick these accounts at random. Adele brings reach, Michael Jackson brings legacy, and Future brings the brand name printed on the coin. Put together, it looks like a coordinated campaign, and that was exactly the idea.
The money: up fast, down faster
The token was launched on Pump.fun, a Solana launchpad. According to Decrypt, it briefly reached a market cap just under $900,000, then fell nearly 98% to about $20,000 after the creator’s wallet, an address ending in “zcmPHn”, sold 700 million tokens, 70% of the supply, in one transaction. That wallet left with 251.57 SOL, worth more than $49,000 at the time.
Forty-nine thousand dollars is a strange number to attach to Adele’s account. It is the kind of sum a hacker could have made more quietly, and that is what bothers me. The famous faces were not the target. They were the advertising, and the fans who bought in early were the ones who paid.
Zara Larsson said what everyone was thinking
None of the core accounts had made any public statement on Instagram or X by the following afternoon, Decrypt reported. Future said nothing either. His account simply disappeared: HotNewHipHop reported on August 24 that he had deactivated it, which looked like a protective step.
Zara Larsson, whom Rolling Stone placed “among the list of seemingly hacked celebrities”, was the only one who said anything about it in real time. On her Instagram Stories she wrote: “Wait??? I didn’t post this???” and then asked: “Do they have access to my account now?” That second question is the one that matters. Seeing the post is bad enough; not knowing whether the stranger is still logged in is worse. (It is also the most relatable thing a pop star said all year.) There is a happier footnote: In 2026 Tyla and Zara Larsson teamed up on “She Did It Again”, a duet from Tyla’s album A*POP, and Tyla later called Larsson “a handcrafted pop star”. Two artists who were swept into the same scam ended up making a song together, which is a better use of a shared Instagram moment than a fake coin.
A year later: no names, no charges
As of October 2026, I can find no public report of an arrest, a named suspect or charges in the FREEBANDZ case, and no Meta statement about it. The pattern has a long history: Decrypt noted that the UFC’s official Instagram was hijacked earlier in 2025 in a scheme that cost crypto buyers $1.4 million, and the 2020 Twitter hack that put Bitcoin pitches on Barack Obama’s and Elon Musk’s accounts is still the textbook example.
Meta has since moved against scam networks on a larger scale. In a two-week operation that began May 18, 2026, run with the Justice Department’s Scam Center Strike Force, the FBI and the Royal Thai Police, the company removed about 1.4 million scam-linked accounts, pages and groups from Facebook and Instagram, and the Royal Thai Police arrested 63 people allegedly connected to scam centers. That operation targeted romance and investment fraud, not this hack. Still, it is the first serious sign that the platform is treating scams as a crime problem rather than a support ticket.
What I changed on my own accounts
If a superstar with a full team can lose control of a grid, the rest of us should take ten minutes this week. The basics have not changed:
- Two-factor authentication on every account that offers it, with an authenticator app rather than SMS where possible.
- Long, unique passwords. NIST’s current guidance favors length over clever symbols, so a long random phrase is better than “P@ssw0rd!”. A generator such as psw.lt or a password manager does the work for you.
- Treat any “surprise drop” with suspicion, especially when it involves a coin, a contract address and a countdown.
The FREEBANDZ coin was worth almost nothing within the hour, but it proved its point. The lock on the front door still matters, and the fans standing outside are the ones who get robbed. Turn on the second lock.
Sources
- Zara Larsson, Instagram Stories, August 2025, as quoted in Rolling Stone: report on the Future, Adele and Zara Larsson Instagram hack (August 22, 2025)
- Decrypt: Adele, Future and Michael Jackson Instagram Accounts Hijacked for Crypto Scam (August 22, 2025)
- Yahoo Finance: report on the Adele, Future and Michael Jackson Instagram hack
- HotNewHipHop: Future deactivates his Instagram account after hackers got hold of it (August 24, 2025)
- Tyla says duet partner Zara Larsson is a “handcrafted” pop star (July 27, 2026)
- WFMD: Meta leads largest-ever anti-scam operation with FBI and DOJ, resulting in 63 arrests (June 3, 2026)
- NIST SP 800-63B-4: Authentication and authenticator management
- CISA: Use strong passwords
