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NASCAR Hall of Fame 2025
Imago
NASCAR Hall of Fame 2025
For followers of Winston Kelley and J. J. Yeley, their social media timelines usually carry a familiar rhythm. Kelley’s posts tend to revolve around Hall of Fame voting days, induction-season milestones, and reflections on NASCAR’s history. Yeley’s feed, meanwhile, is more track-centric: race-weekend check-ins, team announcements, sponsor shout-outs, and the occasional light-hearted message to fans following his journeyman path across NASCAR’s national series. So on the 16th of April, when both accounts suddenly began posting screenshots of five-figure and even six-figure returns from cryptocurrency profits, it was hard not to question whether something was amiss.
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The screenshots had a similar pattern: trading dashboards with unusually quick gains. J. J. Yeley’s account even appeared to suggest he had made around $104,000 in profit within a week, while similar posts surfaced from Winston Kelley’s profile at nearly the same time, both directing followers toward the same supposed crypto contact. Soon enough, it was all proved to be a scam. Shortly after, both shared statements clarifying the situation at hand.
“Please be advised that our Executive Director’s X account @WinstonKelley has been hacked, and recent posts are not legitimate. We are in the process of working with the real Winston Kelley to recover his account,” shared the official NASCAR Hall of Fame account on X.
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Similarly, once Yeley got access to his account, he shared:
Please be advised that our Executive Director’s X account @WinstonKelley has been hacked and recent posts are not legitimate. We are in the process of working with the real Winston Kelley to recover his account.
— NASCAR Hall of Fame (@NASCARHall) April 16, 2026
“Sorry for the confusion… I was hacked and lost access to my account. Thank you @NASCAR for assistance with X getting control back of my account… Unfortunately, I did not make $104k in crypto this week.”
The fake posts on both accounts seemed to be tagging an individual account by the name of Mariann Brooklyn on the platform (@MariannBrooklyn). This particular account owner claims to be a trader, but it is a seemingly fake account, too, created for possible phishing!
Although one might think that NASCAR executives and drivers would be safe from these cyberattacks, it is quite apparent that this is not the case. In fact, just last year, there was a massive data breach in the sport.
When NASCAR was threatened with a major cyberattack
In April of 2025, NASCAR’s online systems seemingly came to a halt. The sport revealed that there had been a major cyberattack and that sensitive information had been stolen from their servers.
As per the authorities, hackers had access to the sport’s network between March 31 and April 3, 2025, and they managed to steal huge chunks of data, which included the social security numbers of individuals in the sport. NASCAR was quick to react to this information. They informed the affected individuals through written notification letters, retained a cybersecurity firm to investigate the matter, and notified law enforcement.
Later, the Medusa ransomware group claimed that they had stolen roughly 1 TB of data from NASCAR’s servers and demanded a $4 million ransom to return the information. However, the sport did not confirm this.
Formula 1 also witnessed something similar just months later in June of 2025. A group of ‘white hat’ hackers had managed to find a loophole in FIA’s cybersecurity and breached their servers. They were able to access sensitive information from a 7,000-driver database. However, they reported the vulnerability to the FIA. This is the process that ‘white hat’ hackers usually go through, as they are not known for exploiting the cybersecurity loopholes.
But both of these events, including the hacking of Winston Kelley and J. J. Yeley’s social media accounts, paint a dire picture for the sport. In an era where practically all processes are digitized, these hackings prove to be a massive threat to security. While NASCAR was quick to make note of these breaches, it is unknown if a similar issue might happen again in the future.
Written by
Edited by
Godwin Issac Mathew