An NFT owner with the Twitter username, Black Apple just lost three of his BAYC NFTs worth $900,000 in ETH to a wallet phishing website.
The attack was first identified and reported by Zachxbt via a tweet last night.
“Seems someone fell for a new BAYC animation phishing site and lost 3 BAYC NFTs ($900k).
Most of the ETH has been sent into Tornado.
https://t.co/eejge3PNZk https://t.co/bYwPL46r7M,” Zachxbt tweeted.
The scammer, Volt, claimed to be BAYC co-founder, created a phishing website for animating NFTs, then misled the BAYC owner to visit the phishing website.
Once the website is open, Black Apple is instructed to click “animate it,” and then tap on “refresh metadata” on OpenSea if he wishes to get his assets animated on Twitter, OpenSea, and Rarible.
Excited to get an animated NFT experience and since the account was “verified”, the BAYC owner followed the instructions.
The move allowed the scammer to gain access to 3 of the collector’s BAYC NFT collections worth $900,000 in ETH. The scammer quickly moved the digital assets to a Tornado Cash wallet address, a non-custodial privacy solution built on the Ethereum ecosystem.
Rising NFT Hacks
NFT has quickly become one of the hottest crypto sectors, seeing significant growth in sales volume in the past year. However, scams related to space have also been on the rise.
Last December, a New York-based NFT collector by the Twitter username, ToddKramer.eth lost over $2 million worth of NFTs to a phishing attack. 16 of his assets were stolen, including BAYC and MAYC.
In January, as reported by Coinfomania, the largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea suffered a front-end attack resulting in the loss of $800,000 worth of ETH. A month later, OpenSea also said it was investigating a rumored smart contract exploit that made users lose their funds.
Meanwhile, not just in the NFT space, crypto scams, in general, have also been on the rise. In 2021, crypto scams cost investors over $7.7 billion, an 81% increase from 2020, Chainalysis reported.
