A Multi-Million Dollar NFT Robbery Just Went Down Over The Weekend
"If your NFT was stolen you can just screenshot it back."
Over a million dollars worth of NFTs have been stolen from users of the world’s biggest token marketplace, in what appears to be a targeted attack orchestrated by a sole token-burglar.
Users of the web 3.0 marketplace OpenSea began reporting missing artworks from their wallets on Saturday night, with the platform later confirming a total of 17 people had been the victims of a targeted phishing scam.
1) We’ve narrowed down the list of impacted individuals to 17, rather than the previously mentioned 32. Our original count included anyone who had *interacted* with the attacker, rather than those who were victims of the phishing attack.
— OpenSea (@opensea) February 21, 2022
While authorities (funnily enough) initially struggled to confirm the exact value of the 254 missing tokens — with figures going as high as a wild $200 million — the developer of OpenSea Devin Finzer later confirmed that the thief flipped the stolen artworks for US$1.7 million’s worth of Ethereum.
Importantly, rumors that this was a $200 million hack are false. The attacker has $1.7 million of ETH in his wallet from selling some of the stolen NFTs.
— Devin Finzer (dfinzer.eth) (@dfinzer) February 20, 2022
The brazen heist appears to have taken place as a phishing scheme, with the thief reportedly convincing users to sign a dodgy contract in order to part them from their precious tokens. Weirdly, as reported by Web 3 Is Going Great, the token burglar has reportedly returned some of the stolen artworks back to their original owners, with one victim even being gifted $150,000 in Ethereum.
Theft in the NFT-sphere is certainly a bizarre concept — especially over a product that can be effectively stolen by right-clicking ‘save image as’. Some other examples of insidious fungal theft include the NFT company Hitpiece which made headlines for listing thousands of musicians’ songs as NFT’s without their permission.
If your NFT was stolen you can just screenshot it back
— Cooker (@CookerFlips) February 20, 2022
OpenSea have promised to keep investigating how the heist happened and have provided a technical explanation of what went down that you can check out here.