Hack NFT: More than 100 million euros stolen since July 2021. Since the beginning of NFTs, according to a study by crypto and blockchain analysis site Elliptic, there have been more than 100 million euros in NFT thefts. Research has shown that hackers steal an average of €300,000 per scam.
Numbers that make you dizzy
The sums collected by thieves in just a few clicks are astronomical. According to the report, the most valuable NFT ever stolen is CryptoPunk #4324, which was stolen last November before being resold for $490,000. It can be seen on the NFT Opensea sales platform that the image has been flagged for suspicious activity. The price dropped to $99,000.
CryptoPunk#4324 stolen and resold for $490,000
The largest single theft amounted to $2.1M and involved 16 “blue chip” NFTs (NFTs known to be stable and a good long-term investment).
Some NFTs from the CloneX collection (#9650 and #5759) have also been stolen by crooks 2 times in the space of 3 months. The price of their sale was over $50,000 each time they were resold.
Unscrupulous flight techniques
NFT thieves use different techniques to get their way. One of the most widespread remains phishing, a fraudulent technique intended to lure the Internet user into communicating personal data by posing as a trusted third party. Here the scammers gain access to their victim's crypto wallet where they can make an irreversible transaction.
It happened to actor and producer Seth Green who had part of his crypto wallet stolen. The total damage amounts to €190,000 with the disappearance of 4 NFTs including a Bored Ape Yacht Club estimated at more than €100,000, two Mutant Apes, and a Doodle. The thief directly resold his loot for a value of €200,000 while the new owner did not comment on the case.
Another investor was robbed of $500,000 worth of NFT just with a simple JPEG image… This happened on the NFT Swap. kiwi exchange. The seller simply added a JPEG image similar to Bored Ape and the buyer was fooled and therefore bought an image and not an NFT.
The technique is just to exchange simple images for NFTs on trading platforms like OpenSea, Rarible, or SuperRare. The platforms claimed to “make every effort” to fight against this kind of fraud.
Scammers also resort to cybersquatting or domain squatting. It is a practice consisting in registering a domain name corresponding to a brand, with the intention of then reselling it to the rightful owner, altering its visibility, or taking advantage of its notoriety.
Some scams are carried out by identity theft, i.e. substituting the identity of a user in a computer system, in particular in the case where this operation is carried out legitimately by an operator accessing the user's account. a customer in the context of user assistance.
Other scams are unique to the NFT realm, including via a Trojan that uses the unique characteristics of a “smart contract” to create a booby-trapped token. If the user accepts it, the fake token can be activated to immediately empty the account on which it is present.
READ MORE: How To Invest In NFTs?
Laundering stolen funds
Finally, crypto and blockchain analytics site Elliptic found that 52% of scammers use Tornado Cash. The latter is based on a smart contract that takes care of anonymizing the funds, which is useful for NFT thieves.
The service, which was placed on the US sanctions list this month, was “the source of $137.6 million in crypto-assets processed by NFT markets and the laundering tool for 52% of proceeds from NFT scams before being sanctioned by OFAC (US Office of Foreign Assets Control) in August 2022,” says Elliptic. “Its prolific use by scammers requires effective sanction screening by NFT platforms.”
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