On Monday, the popular NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYCInstagram)‘s account was hacked.
According to BAYC, the hacker utilised the account’s followers to conduct a phishing campaign that resulted in the theft of millions of dollars in non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Early Monday morning, BAYC, which is managed by the cryptocurrency business Yuga Labs, reported what had transpired on Twitter, urging community members to avoid the fraud.
A BAYC spokeswoman verified specifics of the event in an email to Gizmodo. “We notified our community at 9:53 a.m. ET, withdrew all links to Instagram from our platforms, and sought to restore the compromised Instagram account,” they stated.
The hacked account was reportedly used by the hacker to send community members to a fake BAYC website. They marketed a phoney airdrop there.
Airdrops are a type of crypto marketing strategy in which corporations distribute newly created tokens to members of the community for free in order to encourage participation in certain projects.
According to Motherboard, in this example, the hacker claimed to be selling access to a future Bored Ape project and pushed visitors to link their MetaMask crypto wallets to the site. Users’ digital assets were syphoned out of their wallets and transferred to the hacker’s wallet when they did so.
It’s unclear how the hacker was able to gain access to the BAYC Instagram account. “Two-factor authentication was enabled at the time of the attack, and security around the IG account followed best standards,” the BAYC tweeted on Monday. “We’ve restored control of the account and are working with IG’s team to figure out how the hacker obtained access.”
We contacted Instagram for further information about the event and will update our article if they answer.
Yuga Labs’ BAYC is a collection of 10,000 distinct NFTs of computer-generated apes. The Apes have proven enormously popular (and pricey) since their debut in April, with the complete collection reportedly selling for over $1 billion globally.
The apes, like other NFTs, are precious since there are only 10,000 of them. Because the assets are scarce, some deep-pocketed crypto aficionados are ready to pay tens of thousands of dollars for individual photographs of a strangely clothed monkey because there are only a handful of them in existence, much like a digital beanie baby.
To read our blog on “Coinbase released a version of their Web 3.0 social marketplace for NFTs” click here.
