The Discord servers of NFT projects targeted by scammers, Bored Ape Yacht Club and Nyoki Club in particular affected.
Waiters Discord of several popular NFT projects, including that of Bored Ape Yacht Clubhave been targeted by scammers the 1st of April. Some users have reported losing money because of these bad guys who managed to hack the projects bots to post bogus offers with links to their phishing, according to Motherboard. In one of the posts published by a compromised bot on the Bored Ape server, one might read: “Oh no, our dogs are mutating. MAKC can be stacked for our $APE token. MAYC + BAYC owners will be able to get exclusive rewards by creating and keeping our mutant dogs.”
If a user clicks on the link in the post, they are taken to a site that makes them mint a fake NFT in exchange for Ethereum. Other versions trick victims into sending scammers NFTs into believing various things. Two wallet addresses were linked to these hacks, one of them sold a stolen Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT and sent the other 19.85 ETH, or around $69,000. The recipient wallet would then have sent 61 ETH ($213,000) to a service that can scramble the origin and trace of cryptocurrencies.
It’s hard to know how many people fell victim to these scams, but the project admins quickly issued a warning to users. Bored Ape asked users not to create anything from his Discord and clarified that he was not performing “any April Fool’s Day jokes”. Nyoki Club issued a similar warning and admitted that their “server was also compromised. due to a recent large-scale hack.” And to specify that he was able to regain control of the situation in 30 minutes.
With NFTs becoming increasingly popular, with celebrities like Justin Bieber and Madonna spotlighting these digital products, it’s only logical that these kinds of scams are proliferating at breakneck speed. Caution.