The X account of scrap-metal billionaire and NFT investor Adam Weitsman was hacked on Thursday and used to promote a fake forex trading course and phony “Clawed Ape Yacht Club” memecoin.
The account has since been recovered by one of Weitsman’s associates, X user “@Gabrielesm1,” after an email exchange with an undisclosed party.
“I’ve secured it and everything is under control. I just hope his team doesn’t change the password again,” Gabriel said.
After other X users questioned what caused the hack, Gabriel explained that “Adam’s team changed the account passwords fours days ago so I wasn’t able to see the suspicious login notification.”
Users caught the account sharing two different scams. One was a forex coaching scam that promised it would be able to turn $800 into $50,000 within two hours.
Read more: ‘Biggest NFT trading platform on TRON,’ AINFT, has $6 in volume
The second was a screenshot of a phony Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) memecoin called Clawed Ape Yacht Club (CAYC). The name is a riff off Open Claw, an AI agent project that also got its name from Anthropic’s AI project, Claude.
The post claimed to have put $100,000 worth of solana into the project and encouraged others to trade the CAYC token.
It correlates with a Pump Fun-launched memecoin that started trading late on Thursday. CAYC’s market cap jumped over 200% to $157,000 before plummeting to $16,000 minutes later.
Read more: Paul brothers business partner claims ‘0% rug pull risk’ with new memecoin
Weitsman made most of his riches founding and growing the scrap metal recycling firm Upstate Shredding — Weitsman Recycling back in 1997.
In 2025, Weitsman began to heavily invest in NFTs. He reached a multi-million-dollar deal with Yuga Labs, the owners of BAYC, to acquire 5,000 Otherdeed NFTs and make other acquisitions.
These NFTs are essentially digital plots of land that correlate with the Otherside, a so-called “metaRPG” created by Yuga Labs.
The Otherdeed NFTs have fallen 98.3% in price since the highs they saw at launch in 2022. Its market cap was worth over $1 billion in those first few days after launch, but it’s now worth just shy of $8 million.
Read more: Here’s what’s behind the fall of the Bored Ape Yacht Club
On the day Weitsman announced the deal with Yuga Labs, the market cap of Otherdeeds was $28 million, representing a 71% decrease to today’s value.
Weitsman told Now Media that his contract stipulates that he can’t sell the NFTs. He said, “I felt that would help with liquidity for other people, because they know that the biggest question is, ‘Are these going to come on the market?’ I want to stabilize that.”
