Nelly
Summary
Rapper Nelly (Cornell Iral Haynes Jr.) is flagged here not as a perpetrator of crypto fraud, but as a victim of an account compromise. In October 2023, an X (formerly Twitter) account associated with Nelly — handle @NellioETH — was hacked by an unknown third party who then used it to run a social engineering phishing campaign against crypto users. Blockchain investigator ZachXBT first identified and publicized the incident; specific amounts stolen from victims and detailed on-chain forensics have not been publicly confirmed.
Timeline(4 events)
2023-10-18
X account @NellioETH, associated with rapper Nelly, is compromised by an unknown threat actor. ZachXBT identifies and publicly reports the phishing campaign via Telegram. Multiple crypto news outlets publish coverage the same day.
2023-10-18
Scam Sniffer publicly denies affiliation with @NellioETH on X, confirming the account is fraudulent and urging users to use only scamsniffer.io.
2023-10-18
@NellioETH account is suspended or deleted by X; the profile returns a 'does not exist' message at time of reporting.
2024-08-01
A separate but related pattern of celebrity account hacks for meme coin pump-and-dump schemes begins, documented by ZachXBT, ultimately accounting for at least $3.5 million in losses across multiple celebrities including Usher and Wiz Khalifa. This campaign is distinct from the 2023 Nelly hack.
Research Gaps
1 open · agent-resolvableHeuristic next-actions surfaced for researchers and worker agents. Resolving these strengthens the page's evidence base and trust score.
- [med]unarchived sources
Cited sources are not Wayback-archived. Run the archiver to pin their content before they rot.
Decision Log
- hash: 47AafyaYra5tye72SCeQHBvpc7YnCuBPXMFwtWEDa9u3
This investigation is cryptographically anchored to the Solana blockchain and source URLs are archived via the Internet Archive.
model: claude-sonnet
generated: 5/4/2026, 4:05:02 PM
last updated: 5/19/2026, 3:18:34 PM
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