Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), one of the world’s most prestigious and most valuable NFT sets, saw its Instagram account and Discord servers hacked on Monday, with an unofficial “mint” link being sent out to followers.
Crypto enthusiasts who connected their MetaMask wallets to the scam website were subsequently drained of their Ape NFTs. It appears that the attack was planned to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the launch of the BAYC collection, thus increasing the “perceived credibility” of the phishing link.
The platform took to Twitter to announce, “There is no mint going on today. It looks like BAYC Instagram was hacked. Do not mint anything, click links or link your wallet to anything.” According to data from OpenSea transfers, it is estimated that around 24 Bored Apes and 30 Mutant Apes have been stolen, although some of these may be holders transferring their non-fungible tokens for security purposes.
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What you should know
- The fraudulent link claimed that users could mint “land” in the upcoming OthersideMeta, a metaverse the platform is launching, due later this week.
- The wallets of those who clicked the link have now been compromised, with a series of Bored Apes and Mutant Apes being transferred to new wallets by the hackers.
- Based on data from CoinGecko, the floor price of each BAYC NFT is around 139 Ether or $400,726, as of the time of this writing. Thus, if the reports are authentic, about $13.7 million worth of assets could have been lost in the attack. However, the numbers may only represent the lower end of the estimate as it is based on floor price.
- Yuga Labs says the scope of the attack is far smaller.
- A Yuga Lab’s spokesperson told CoinDesk that, “The hacker posted a fraudulent link to a copycat of the Bored Ape Yacht Club website, where a safeTransferFrom attack asked users to connect their MetaMask to the scammer’s wallet in order to participate in a fake Airdrop. At 9:53am ET, we alerted our community, removed all links to Instagram from our platforms and attempted to recover the hacked Instagram account.”
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The spokesperson said that Yuga Labs and Instagram are still investigating how the account was compromised. The spokesperson further stated, “Rough estimated losses due to the scam are 4 Bored Apes, 6 Mutant Apes, and 3 BAKC, as well as assorted other NFTs estimated at a total value of ~$3m. We are actively working to establish contact with affected users.”
BAYC has grown to become an all-time favorite NFT collection in the crypto realm, generating more than $1 billion in sales in 2021. The collection’s supply is fixed at 10,000 NFTs. More than 38,748 ETH worth of Apes were traded on OpenSea in the past 30 days.
