Seth Green NFT theft part of multi-million dollar fraud campaign, investigator says
Hacking. Misinformation. Surveillance. CYBER is Motherboard’s podcast and reporting on the dark abdomen on the internet.
In May, some stole several valuable NFTs from actor Seth Green. The thieves got their hands on a Bored Monkey, which was to play in a TV program with an NFT theme launched by Green. The theft raised the question of whether Green was still allowed to use Bored Ape for the show or whether he lost the copyright.
Green begged the hacker, and a person who bought an NFT from the hacker, to return his precious NFTs. “We can prove the promise of the monkey community,” Green said at the time, hoping the theft would be solved. And eventually, the scammer came back the stolen Bored Monkey. BuzzFeed News reported that blockchain records suggest that Green may have paid a premium of $ 100,000 for NFT’s safe return.
Now a blockchain detective said that the theft of Green’s NFTs was part of a sophisticated multi-million dollar fraud operation that has brought in many victims. ZachXBT, one of the most famous independent researchers exposing scammers, scammers and hackers in a world of cryptocurrency, wrote a long thread explaining his findings.
ZachXBT wrote that he was able to track the movement of the crypto that the scammer obtained by selling the stolen NFTs, even though the hacker laundered “large amounts of crypto through small transactions”, a technique known as “peel chain”. After that, the scammer sent the money back to his wallet.
“This is just one example of the steps taken by the scammer. In reality, the scammer has laundered stolen crypto in the same way through many different addresses for millions of dollars,” ZachBXT wrote on Twitter.
In a chat with Motherboard, ZachBXT said that blockchain emails show that the scammer sent crypto to a number of new wallets, which were used to create NFT contracts that contained links to a phishing website, which they sent to targets. One of those targets, he said, was Seth Green.
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The scammer was able to steal NFTs from more victims than just Green thanks to these malicious contracts. The researcher said that he was able to connect the wallet that was used to transfer the stolen Seth Green NFTs to the scammer, because it was one of the many that were financed by a single crypto wallet. The scammer sent the stolen crypto to Wasabi, a Bitcoin mixing service that allows users to hide the traces of the movements of their cryptocurrency, ZachXBT added.
Seth Green’s publishers and agent did not respond to a request for comment via email.
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