Another day, another robbery of the yacht club Bored Ape. On Monday, a hacker logged into the account of the popular NFT brand on Instagram and posted a link to an alleged dump that will give existing Bored Ape owners free land distribution in the upcoming metaverse of the Otherside. But the link included in the post was a phishing scam. The people who opened it and linked their crypto wallet were stolen by NFT from the Bored Ape Yacht Club.
The swindler walked away with a huge sum. In total, according to one of the founders of Bored Ape, four Bored Ape Yacht Club, six Mutant Ape Yacht Club and three Bored Ape Kennel Club NFT were stolen by fraud. The scam did not only affect BAYC NFT: one user also lost his Cloning X NFTworth about $ 54,000.
Bored Ape’s Yacht Club the original NFT collection created by Yuga Labs last April and right now each costs a minimum of $ 430,000 (145 ether). The Bored Ape Kennel Club is a set of dogs that, according to the BAYC canon, are pets owned by Bored Apes. These were free airdrops for Bored Ape owners last June and now cost a minimum of $ 42,000 (14 ethers). Finally, the Mutant Ape Yacht Club collection launched last August – again a free fall for all existing BAYC owners – and now has a minimum price of $ 117,000 (39 ethers).
So whatever your feelings about the long-term resilience of the NFT bubble, the extraction is today worth a huge sum: $ 2.57 million. OpenSea, the largest market for NFT, has labeled “suspicious activity” on stolen goods, but no one can stop the sale of NFT. The hacker has already unloaded several on LooksRare, another NFT market.
Bored Ape Yacht Club’s four NFTs alone sold for a total of $ 1.6 million (540 ethers).
The history of the Bored Ape Yacht Club and the many free gifts given to the owners illustrate in part why fraud in the NFT space can be successful. In real life, the prospect of being given an asset worth hundreds of thousands of dollars is an obvious red flag. In the world of NFT, not so unusual. This is normal for Bored Ape owners. Last month alone, all Bored Ape owners received an airdrop of Ape Coin, Yuga Labs’ new cryptocurrency, which cost just over $ 100,000 at the time. (The price has doubled since then.)
“For now, I would like to emphasize that 2FA has been activated in the account,” tweeted Gargamel, one of the founders of Yuga Labs. “The security practices around the IG account were strict at the end of the South. Nothing important will ever be posted on Instagram again.”