WWE’s official Facebook page got hijacked mid-broadcast during Friday Night SmackDown to push a fake cryptocurrency called WWE Coin, and it took fourteen minutes for anyone to pull the post down — plenty of time for screenshots to outlive the crime scene.
I spent a year and a half after college reading incident reports for a housing nonprofit, and I know what negligence looks like on paper. Getting hacked isn’t a moral failure. That happens to everybody eventually, even outfits with real security budgets. What actually offends me is what came after: WWE’s own accounts got turned into a scam vector, and the company deleted the posts and said nothing.
The sequence, stitched together from the coverage, goes like this. On September 11, while SmackDown aired live from Arena CDMX in Mexico City (WWE’s first show there in fifteen years), WWE’s Facebook page posted a fake WWE Coin crypto launch complete with a contract address, the exact kind of detail that makes a scam read as legitimate to somebody scrolling fast. Instagram got hit with the identical scam while the show was still on the air. Whoever ran it wasn’t subtle. They didn’t need to be. Here’s the actual post, screenshotted before it vanished:
https://twitter.com/stevecarrier_/status/2098863443759550832
Fourteen minutes doesn’t sound like much until you picture the person on the other end of it — somebody scrolling between matches, seeing WWE’s own verified badge attached to a coin launch, and deciding this is the one that’s real. That person didn’t get a correction. WWE quietly regained control of the Instagram account, wiped both posts, and moved on like nothing happened. No statement, no on-air mention, no acknowledgment that its own name had just been used against its own fans.
The infuriating part is WWE had eighteen months of warning this was coming. SmackDown General Manager Nick Aldis had his personal account hacked with this exact same WWE Coin scam back in March 2025, and he handled it the way an actual person handles getting hacked: he showed up and cracked a joke about it, because that’s what you do when you’re a guy with a phone and no PR department standing between you and your followers. WWE Superstar Asuka went through her own version in February 2025, her account hijacked to push a different meme coin entirely. Two wrestlers, two separate hacks, both handled by the wrestlers themselves in public. The one time it happened to WWE’s actual corporate accounts, the machine that owns a broadcast deal and sells out arenas in Mexico City went quiet.
There’s a version of this where the silence is defensible, if legal wants everyone quiet during an active cleanup and nobody wants to say something that ages badly two hours later. Fine. But nothing about a live, three-hour broadcast stops a company from finding four seconds to say it’s aware and working on it. That’s not a legal risk. That’s a sentence.
The instinct is the tell. A company with SmackDown’s production budget and Netflix’s distribution muscle has the resources to type a sentence acknowledging an Instagram hack — it just doesn’t have the reflex. Eighteen months of pattern, and there’s still no incident-response playbook, just a delete button and the hope that a Friday night audience forgets by Monday. We’ve made some version of this point across the rest of our WWE coverage more than once this year: whatever leadership means at this company, it doesn’t mean showing up when something breaks.
Nobody at WWE said a word, and that’s the whole review. The scam ran for fourteen minutes on real accounts with real followers, somebody almost certainly got taken for whatever they were willing to put in, and the company’s official position is that it would rather you just forget. That’s not a security failure. That’s a choice, and it’s a shitty one.
