OpenSea Froze Stolen Bored Apes After Apparent Phishing Attack

OpenSea froze stolen Bored Ape and Mutant Ape NFTs after an apparent phishing attack that we are reading more about in our latest crypto latest news today.

Following the apparent phishing attack, OpenSea froze Stolen Bored Ape and Mutant Ape NFTs owned by the New York-based art curator Todd Kramer who reported that his collection that was worth $1.9 million was hacked and stolen. According to a few reports, one Clonex, 7 Mutant Ape Yacht Club, and 8 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs are valued at about 615 ETH were stolen and are now able to be traded on OpenSea.

Kramer announced that he had clicked on the link that appeared to be on the NFT decentralized application but it turned out to be a phishing attack and 16 of the NFTs were stolen after the hackers gained more access to his wallet “I been hacked all my apes gone.” The hot wallet is a type of crypto software wallet that is connected to the internet, mostly MetAMask whenever the device is installed or connected.

NFTs are cryptographically unique digital tokens that prove ownership of physical or digital content like art, GIFs, or music file. The Bored Ape Yacht Club is one of the most popular PFP collections as a series of cartoon ape images with the randomly-generated attributes. Some people argued that appealing to a third party to freeze NFTs that went against the core idea of decentralized is one of the most cherished aspects of the crypto industry.

Among most others that voiced their concerns about the lack of decentralization, famed software engineer Grady Booch said:

“silly me. And here I thought that the code is the law and that one of the very ideas of cryptocurrencies was the elimination of any possibility of centralized intervention.”

The Predecessors of Kramer’s phishing scam came at the end of December when NFT collector Bergpay.eth noted he suffered a similar fate when 2 Sandbox NFT were stolen from his ETH wallet and his ENS domain was transferred to a new address. According to the reports in the wider crypto space, phishing is a growing problem with the PhishLabs company reporting a tenfold increase in these attacks on exchanges during the first half of 2021 compared to 2020. with the rise of popularity and monetary value of NFTs hacked started sensing an opportunity to make big money.

Among the biggest phishing attacks this year, tens of thousands of dollars worth of NFTs were reported stolen from the Nifty Gateway market by cyber attackers in March while in August we saw the developer Stazie lost 16 CryptoPunks NFT to a phishing attack that involved a malicious pop-up.