Roaring Kitty hack drains $2.8M from traders

Keith Gill’s verified X account was apparently hacked on May 11, with bad actors using the Roaring Kitty profile to launch and dump a Solana meme coin.

Two posts appeared on Gill’s verified X account at around 21:13 UTC on May 11, ending a 16-month silence. The first shared a Pump.fun contract address for a Solana meme coin called Red Kitten Crew, ticker RKC. The second included a cartoon clip with the phrase “red bandit crew 4 life.” Both were deleted within an hour.

On-chain analyst StarPlatinum was among the first to flag the incident, posting that the account had been hacked and that over 80 wallets had extracted $2,864,364 during the brief rally.

RKC hit a market cap of $11 to $12 million within 20 minutes of the posts going live before collapsing sharply when the posts were removed.

How the dump played out

Blockchain analytics firm Lookonchain tracked the developer’s wallets and reported that the individual spent just 20 $SOL, worth approximately $1,950, across 10 wallets to acquire 395.18 million RKC tokens, equal to 39.52% of the total supply.

Those wallets then sold the entire position for 5,071 $SOL, worth approximately $495,000. The developer also collected an additional 1,209 $SOL, roughly $118,000, in Pump.fun creator fees.

Unverified community speculation, circulating on social media, has pointed to Kevin Gill, Keith’s brother, as a possible figure connected to the incident, after a livestream clip surfaced showing someone resembling him celebrating the launch. Neither Keith Gill, Kevin Gill, nor their representatives have publicly addressed the allegations, and no confirmed evidence has been presented.

Pattern matches previous X hacks

The incident follows a well-established pattern on Solana. In early 2025, Pump.fun’s own X account was briefly hijacked to promote a fake governance token. Earlier, Animoca co-founder Yat Siu’s X account was compromised to shill a Solana meme coin in December 2024.

GameStop shares rose as much as 13% during the RKC episode before erasing all gains.

Gill has never publicly promoted a meme coin and has not issued any statement on the account activity at the time of writing. Keith Gill rose to prominence in 2021 when his analysis of GameStop shares on Reddit triggered one of the most dramatic short squeezes in stock market history.