$13.5 Million Worth of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs Stolen, Reports Find – ARTnews.com

Nearly 150 Bored Ape Yacht Club non-fungible tokens have been stolen since the blue-chip collection launched in June 2021, according to a report released Tuesday by Web3 security firm Immunefi. The 143 NFTs, collectively worth $13,582,962, were stolen from owners through a series of scams and hacks.

The majority of this value was stolen during two major hacks in 2022. In April, hackers posted a phishing link – a malicious link used to steal user data. — to the BAYC official Instagram page. The link led to a copy of BAYC’s website, where users were offered previously unknown “benefits”, but when users clicked on the link, the hackers tapped the victims’ Ethereum wallets. In June, hackers posted a phishing link directly to the Discord channels of BAYC and Otherside, an upcoming metaverse “game” developed by BAYC’s parent company Yuga Labs. The hackers posed as the channel’s moderator Boris Vagner, whose account had already been hacked.

Immunefi collected their data by scanning OpenSea for chained monkeys that have been flagged for suspicious activity, as well as combing social media for claims of theft which were then investigated using blockchain analytics. They looked for suspicious activity all the way back to the foundation of the collection until they completed the report in early August 2022.

Although 143 NFTs represent only a fraction of the 10,000 available BAYC NFTs, the problem is that once these items are stolen, they are highly unlikely to be retrieved given decentralized assets.

Because Yuga Labs gives IP rights to owners of a Bored Ape, the IP is essentially lost to the hackers and given to whoever buys the stolen goods later – whether intentionally or not. In fact, in May comedian Seth Green announced that several of his NFTs were stolen in a phishing scam. Green had developed a TV show with his Bored Ape; the hack begged the question of the show’s future.

As BAYC IP becomes more valuable, as shown by Eminem and Snoop Dogg who recently used their IP rights to film a Bored Apes music video and sell BAYC-themed merch, the entire collection is undermined as hackers muddy the waters of IP ownership.

Of the 143 stolen BAYC NFTs, only 9 have been delisted for suspicious activity on NFT platform OpenSea, meaning 134 monkeys are still frozen and can no longer be traded on the platform.

“These days the marketplaces are not in control,” Alejandro Muñoz-McDonald, a software engineer at Immunefi, added ART news. “People can still transfer [stolen assets] to another account and sell them on decentralized marketplaces where blacklisting features are not available.”

After a valuable NFT has been stolen, according to Muñoz-McDonald, hackers will first “launder” the item, transferring it to so many different accounts that a new, more innocent-looking provenance is established with no easily identifiable links to the hacker’s suspicious, temporary Ethereum address .

According to the report, a Bored Ape reported for suspicious activity on OpenSea recently sold for 194 ETH, equivalent to $267,914 dollars at the time of Immunefi’s reporting in early August.

A report released last week by blockchain analytics firm Elliptic estimated that over $100 million in NFTs were stolen between January and July of this year.