While there have been many jokes about downloading a non-fungible token (NFT) somebody displays on their social media profiles and claiming you’ve stolen it, the real value of that NFT is the space it occupies on the blockchain it uses.
Of course, even that statement is loaded as the value of an NFT is very much determined by the market which is a conversation for another day. For the purposes of this story we’re talking about the space on the blockchain and not the colourful ape on a yacht.
We have to make this distinction because as many as 32 Opensea users appear to have fallen victim to a phishing campaign.
“As far as we can tell, this is a phishing attack. We don’t believe it’s connected to the OpenSea website. It appears 32 users thus far have signed a malicious payload from an attacker, and some of their NFTs were stolen,” said Devin Finzer, chief executive officer and co-founder of the NFT trading platform.
The attacker in this instance appears to have convinced users to sign a malicious contract which allowed the attacker to take ownership of the NFTs and sell them on.
Bizarrely, Web3 is Going Just Great reports that some victims had their NFTs returned to them. One victim even had 50 Ethereum returned to them as well as some of their stolen NFTs.
As for the NFTs the attacker did sell, they transferred the funds – 1 115 Ethereum – to a crypto tumbler. While it’s not impossible to track funds once they’ve gone through a tumbler, it is time consuming.
There were fears that the theft of NFTs was caused by something else but Opensea is adamant that all victims were the target of a phishing attack and that there is no issue with the Opensea platform. The CEO also outlined what isn’t a vector of attack on Opensea in an exhaustive Twitter thread.
The value of the assets that were stolen is said to be worth around $1.7 million but as we mentioned previously, this value is determined by the market. The victims of the theft are receiving support from Opensea but we don’t expect there to be much sympathy from the general public and those who believe NFTs are just the latest version of snake oil.
