Fraudsters are exploiting the Magic Eden NFT marketplace to sell fake NFTs
Non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace Magic Eden was recently exploited by fraudsters listing fake NFTs, deceiving unsuspecting buyers. While promising to refund the buyers, the platform claimed that it had fixed the problem that a user interface problem had allegedly caused.
The scammers targeted popular NFT pools, mainly ABC and y00ts, listing fake NFTs and selling them for hundreds of dollars. NFT creators took to social media platforms to expose the scammers, and Magic Eden thanked the community for alerting it to the scam.
Don’t buy these @y00tsNFT on @MagicEdenthey are fake!
Basically every collection is fake on Magiced, a massive exploit going on.
High value NFTs suffer the most, as attackers choose to exploit higher value NFTs first. pic.twitter.com/35RYHOKVxd
— HGE.SOL 🔤🧙♂️ (@HGESOL) 4 January 2023
While Magic Eden initially claimed to have fixed the problem and removed all the fake NFTs, its creators disputed the claims on social media, revealing that the scammers were able to continue listing the fake NFTs.
“Update: Please hard refresh your browsers to ensure you only see verified collection items. We are monitoring the situation and will use this thread for updates. Earlier today we fixed the root issue but believe users who did not hard reload their browser were still seeing unverified NFT – are on collection and activity pages, says the NFT marketplace later. chirping.
The platform later revealed that the fraudsters had managed to sell 13 fake NFTs for 1100 SOL, valued at $15,000 at the time. It promised to refund the affected users in full.
In the post-mortem investigation, the Solana-based marketplace blamed the failure on new features it recently implemented.
“This was a UI issue due to a new feature implementation that we rolled out to our Snappy Marketplace and Pro Trade tools. Unfortunately, there was a bug deployed in an update to both of these features where NFTs were not verified before being listed in these two tools, which automatically included the items in the collection at large.The technical explanation is that our activity indexes for these two tools did not check that the creator address is verified, it says.
Alongside the fake NFTs, Magic Eden also had to deal with another bug that caused users to see pornographic images when trying to view some NFTs. The marketplace blamed this error on a third-party image caching service.
Just like with the other issue, Magic Eden told users that this was nothing a hard update to their browsers couldn’t fix.
Hi guys our image provider, a third party service we use to cache images, was compromised. Your NFTs are safe and Magic Eden has not been hacked. Unfortunately, you may have seen some creepy pictures. Make sure you do a hard update on your browser to fix it.
— Magic Eden 🪄 (@MagicEden) 3 January 2023
End of the road for Solana?
While the bugs are a minor setback, Magic Eden has been heavily impacted by the continued decline in the use of the Solana blockchain. With his biggest supporter Sam Bankman-Fried now staring at a prison sentence for fraud at FTX, Solana’s best days appear to be behind him. Recently, two of the biggest NFT projects left the chain, migrating to Polygon and Ethereum.
y00ts will officially bridge to @0xPolygon in the 1st quarter of 2023. pic.twitter.com/Mnz25dJko1
— y00ts (@y00tsNFT) 25 December 2022
DeGods and y00ts announced that they would be migrating from Solana at the end of December, and the founder claimed that they had a glass ceiling on the blockchain network.
“It’s hard to accept, but it’s been tough to grow at the rate we want to grow. There is an argument for that [DeGods] has taken hold of Solana,” said the founder, known as Frank III to his fans.
The migrations capped what has been Solana’s worst year to date. Just days before, in early December, hackers exploited a fake security patch to wipe out users of the Solana-powered Phantom wallet. The hackers sent NFTs to users and upon receipt, users were redirected to a fake update that gave hackers access to their wallet.
Solana’s woes have seen the token take a dive, falling from $258 in late 2021 to now trading at $16.
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