- The official Instagram account of the NFT collection, Bored Ape Yacht Club was hacked causing 54 Apes, 24 Bored and 30 Mutant to be stolen.
- This robbery represents a figure close to $13.7 million dollars.
- This is the third attack that the collection has suffered in the last month.
Some of the NFT collections, or non-fungible tokens, have been positioned as a symbol of exclusivity. An example of this is the collection of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), since this collection doesn’t just give an exclusive NFT, owning some of these digital monkeys makes you part of an exclusive club.
For all the benefits that these tokens provide, in addition to their high prices, the collection has become a target for hackers. The most recent attack was the BAYC official instagram accountwho on April 25 suffered a hack which allowed at least 54 monkeys (24 Bored Apes and 30 Mutant Apes) to be stolen, which represents a figure close to 13.7 million dollars.
How was the robbery carried out?
The modus operandi was similar to many other scams. After taking over the official account, the computer thieves created a post mentioning the next release of the BAYC metaverse, which was scheduled for April 30, describes CryptoSlate. AThere they asked users to plug in their addresses.
Each of those NFTs were transferred to a new address. As can be seen in the transaction history of the wallet used for the attack on ethersacan we can see that 54 monkeys were stolen.
As usually happens in these cases, the rumors of the hack first emerged on social networks and on the famous Reddit forum. Then, pressed for answers, the official BAYC account confirmed it in a post.
“At the time of the hack, two-factor authentication was enabled and we are investigating how the hacker gained access to our account. For the safety of our community, we will not be posting anything here or on @OthersideMeta until the investigation is complete and we decide our next steps.”, they explained.
While adding:
“There will only be information through the Twitter accounts of @BoredApeYC, @yugalabs and @OthersideMeta. If you were hacked or have relevant information, please contact [email protected]. You will have to send an email first, no one will contact you if there is no initial contact. They will never be asked for the seed phrase either.”.
BYAC, targets of hackers
As we mentioned at the beginning, the BAYC community, due to its popularity and price, has become an interesting target for scammers in recent months.
In December of last year, a collector lost 15 NFT made up of eight from Bored Ape and seven from Mutant Ape. It was enough that he clicked on a fake contract of what seemed to be a real one to lose everything. Those monkeys were valued at $2.2 million dollars.
This month there were two others: on April 1, the day of the innocents, BAYC’s Discord was hacked. The thief posted fake mint links and it was Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou who fell: he lost his MAYC #8662, valued at $550k.
The other came four days later when a user lost three overalls: BAYC#1584, MAYC #13168 and MAYC#13169 were stolen and sold for less than market value. The first buyer was left with fake pictures of the monkeys from him.
The crypto world is full of opportunities, but also of dangers. It is very important to know where you place your money and check several times that you are doing the right thing.
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