Todd Kramer, an artist who is a member of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), took to the microblogging platform, Twitter (NYSE:TWTR), to reveal that he lost $2.2 million worth of the NFTs to phishers. This resulted from the artist's clicking on a malicious link represented as a crypto app gateway. On realization that he has been defrauded, Kramer took to Twitter to post:
"I been hacked. All my apes gone. This just sold, please help me."Surprisingly, the artist was welcomed with trolls rather than sympathizers. Unfortunately, these trolls rather incorporated his distress tweet into a famous song lyric. However, OpenSea came to the artist's rescue and 'froze' the pilfered apes. Simply put, the alleged stolen Bored Apes cannot be sold or bought on the NFT marketplace until the ban is lifted. Some empathetic persons on crypto Twitter also aided Kramer in recovering some of his lost tokens.
In recent times, Bored Apes has developed progressively in months. In December, the project flipped CryptoPunks when its "floor price," the lowest price in the series, hit 60 ETH ($200,000) on OpenSea.
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This week alone, Bored Apes surmounted $1billion in overall sales, despite being launched last April. In the last 30 days, CryptoSlam has reported a rough estimate of $7.4 million worth of trades.
Bored Apes, an easy target for fraudsters?
Many celebrities such as Jimmy Kimmel, Shaquille O'Neal, Serena Williams, Eminem have bought Bored Apes. However, famous holders and rising prices have made it known that this is a season for scammers, hackers, and fraudsters ready to swindle NFT newbies.
In November last year, an NFT collector, Calvin Becerra, clicked a link in a Discord Server that allowed hackers to abscond with three Apes, with more than $1 million at the time. Unfortunately, Becerra's distress plea on Twitter for persons not to buy or trade these stolen apes was not met with a positive response. While some regarded him as careless, others suggested retrieving his artwork by right-clicking and saving the images.