Scammers are launching phishing sites impersonating the prominent NFT marketplace – Bored Ape Yach Club (BAYC) after the ApeCoin token launch. A user ended up losing 3 NFTs on a new BAYC animation phishing site.
Since its launch last year, BAYC has become one of the biggest names in the NFT space. Multi-million dollar sales and a rapidly growing list of celebrity owners have managed to bring in lucrative opportunities for scammers.
Rampant Phishing Attacks
ZachXBT, the popular crypto sleuth, revealed that a user fell for a phishing site impersonating BAYC and lost around $900k. Most of the stolen Ethereum was sent to Tornado. ZachXBT also urged users to stop connecting their wallets and approving transactions on random sites.
The victim of the phishing attack was identified to be a Twitter user who goes by the name – Black Apple.
Our friend @BlackAppleArt had 3 of his Bored Apes stolen today by a fraudster. I I’d like to initiate #BAYCBUYBACK tag with the idea for @BoredApeYC to buy them back and deliver to the real owner. Can we try to get this to @yugalabs and @BoredApeYC? Tweet #BAYCBUYBACK! pic.twitter.com/ogyRfCZQPc
— O Criador (@OCriador) March 22, 2022
Phishers Steal Azuki
The latest news comes in just days after a phishing hack drained more than $75k worth of assets from multiple digital wallets. Right after the hyped launch of ApeCoin on March 17, scammers rushed to lure unassumed users to a link that managed to siphon off their NFTs and ETH.
In a bid to promote their phishing sites, ZackXBT earlier revealed that the malicious entities bought hacked verified accounts on the micro-blogging website – Twitter – and used bots to tag people in the replies. The phishing website impersonated the BAYC claim website and lured victims into getting their free APE tokens.
NFT holders who connected their wallets to the claim site were immediately drained of their NFTs and ETH. In total, users lost nearly $73.5k (more than 26.1 ETH). The stolen NFTs, most notably Azuki, were put up for sale by the phishers.
The crypto investigator tweeted,
“These scammers typically buy verified Twitter accounts on forums for a few thousand dollars and then proceed to profit running fake giveaways & advertising sketchy projects. This time they launched a phishing site. Always triple check the site you are connecting your wallet too so you don’t become the next victim.”
Fraudsters are leveraging the frenzy around BAYC’s launch of a new token – ApeCoin. CryptoPotato earlier reported that an anonymous user managed to rake in 60,000 APE tokens that amounted to almost $1 million during the airdrop via a flashloan.
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