Greg Gutfeld's X account was hijacked on Saturday, flooding his more than 3 million followers with identical phishing messages designed to steal their login credentials. The Fox News host — who co-hosts The Five and headlines the late-night show Gutfeld! — had his account weaponized by unnamed scammers who used it to send direct messages urging recipients to "co-host an upcoming entertainment show" and directing them to a fake voting page rigged to harvest personal information.
A Fox News spokesperson confirmed the hack. According to the Washington Examiner, Grox, X's AI chatbot, issued an alert identifying the scope of the attack and the bogus link.
The breach turned one of the most-followed conservative voices on social media into an unwitting delivery system for fraud — and the response from the broader right-of-center internet was swift, sharp, and occasionally hilarious.
The scam worked exactly the way these things always do — a trusted name, an urgent ask, and a link that looks just legitimate enough. What made this one notable was the size of the audience. Over 3 million people received the same message from a verified, high-profile account. That's not a phishing attempt. That's a broadcast.
Some figured it out immediately. Conservative commentator Stephen L. Miller spotted the con and flagged it for his followers with characteristic dry wit:
"If the DM hack is actually going to work they need to start sending me people who I don't already know how they talk."
Miller's point lands because it's true. Anyone who has spent more than a week reading Gutfeld's posts knows the man has a specific, unmistakable voice. The scammers apparently didn't bother studying it. They just blasted a generic pitch to millions and hoped volume would compensate for craft. For people who actually follow Gutfeld — who know his humor, his cadence, his tendency to turn a phrase sideways — the message read like a stranger wearing a bad disguise.
Other prominent X users — including influencers Jarvis, Catturd, and Amuse — also highlighted the scam and warned their audiences not to click. The conservative internet, for all the grief it takes from the legacy press, policed this faster than any platform moderation team could have.
Not everyone was so quick on the draw. Former Saturday Night Live star Rob Schneider appeared to engage with the scheme, posting:
"PLEASE VOTE FOR GREG GUTFELD YOU CAN DO IT!!"
Whether Schneider was genuinely fooled or just riffing isn't entirely clear, but the episode illustrates how even public figures with large followings can get caught in the blast radius of a compromised account. When the message comes from someone you know — or think you know — the instinct is to engage first and scrutinize later. That's the entire business model of phishing, and it works whether you're a retiree clicking a fake bank email or a celebrity responding to a DM from a hijacked account.
Account hacks on X are nothing new, but they keep exposing the same vulnerability: the platform's verification system gives compromised accounts an aura of legitimacy that makes phishing dramatically more effective. When a blue-check account with millions of followers sends you a direct message, most people don't stop to run a forensic analysis on the syntax. They click.
That's the fundamental tension. Verification was supposed to be a trust signal — a way to know you're dealing with the real person. But when a verified account gets compromised, that trust signal becomes a weapon. The scammers didn't need to build their own credibility. They just stole Gutfeld's.
This is the kind of security problem that erodes trust in the platform itself. Conservative media figures have built massive audiences on X — audiences that are now targets precisely because of their size and engagement. The scammers didn't hack Gutfeld's account because they care about late-night television. They hacked it because 3 million engaged followers represent 3 million potential marks.
There's no indication yet whether any users actually surrendered their credentials through the fake voting page, or what the full scope of the damage looks like.
This wasn't random. High-profile conservative accounts on X sit at a unique intersection that makes them irresistible to scammers: massive follower counts, highly engaged audiences, and a community culture built on direct communication rather than institutional gatekeeping.
Conservative media figures have spent years cultivating direct relationships with their audiences on social media — deliberately bypassing legacy outlets that they (rightly) don't trust to represent them fairly. That direct pipeline is a strength. It's also a vulnerability. When someone compromises the pipeline, the trust that makes it powerful becomes the very mechanism of the attack.
The left-leaning press will likely frame this as a story about platform security under Elon Musk's ownership, because everything on X eventually gets routed back to that narrative. But phishing hacks predate Musk's acquisition by decades. They predate X itself. The problem isn't who owns the platform. The problem is that social engineering works on humans regardless of who signs the corporate checks.
What's worth noting is who responded and how. The conservative community on X identified the scam, flagged it publicly, and warned each other — all before any official platform response materialized. Miller, Jarvis, Catturd, Amuse, and others acted as a de facto early warning system.
Conservative voices on social media have weathered shadow bans, algorithmic suppression, and outright suspensions. Now they face a different kind of threat — not from the platforms themselves, but from bad actors who exploit the trust those voices have painstakingly built with their audiences.
A hack like this doesn't just embarrass one host. It poisons the well. Every legitimate DM from a public figure now carries a faint whiff of suspicion. Every link shared becomes a small gamble. For an audience that already navigates a media landscape designed to mislead them — from legacy outlets that bury stories to social platforms that tweak algorithms — adding "your favorite host's DM might be a scam" to the list is one more tax on trust.
The scammers didn't just compromise an account. They borrowed credibility that took years to earn and spent it in an afternoon.
Gutfeld will recover. His audience isn't going anywhere. But the episode is a reminder that the infrastructure conservative media relies on to reach people directly is only as strong as its weakest security protocol. The right has built something powerful on these platforms — a parallel information ecosystem that doesn't need CNN's permission to exist. Protecting it requires the same vigilance that built it.