Why are they worth so much money?
You might be familiar with Bored Ape Yacht Club, purveyors of those ugly monkey NFT’s you see people with. Well, it turns out that their Instagram account got hacked. But it doesn’t end there, no; the hacker then used that access to run a phishing scheme that stole millions in pug-fugly apes from the account’s followers. All told, they seem to have stolen 134 of the unsightly little things.
The hacker took the liberty of using the account to redirect followers to a fake BAYC site, advertising a fake airdrop. Airdrop is cryptocurrency lingo used in place of “giveaway” to sound mysterious and cool. In this case the hacker advertised access to an upcoming BAYC project, encouraging users to link their MetaMask crypto wallets to the site, with predictable end results.
Once they caught on, Yuga Labs, the crypto company running Bored Ape Yacht Club, tweeted out what happened early Monday morning.
In a statement to Gizmodo, a BAYC spokesape said the following:
At 9:53am ET, we alerted our community, removed all links to Instagram from our platforms and attempted to recover the hacked Instagram account.
Rough estimated losses due to the scam are 4 Bored Apes, 6 Mutant Apes, and 3 BAKC [Bored Ape Kennel Club], as well as assorted other NFTs estimated at a total value of ~$3m. We are actively working to establish contact with affected users.
Nobody knows just how the hacker got in to the account. Least of all, Bored Ape Yacht Club.
Sorta sounds like an inside job. That’d be a real shitter, eh?
Source: Gizmodo
About Author
