The American actor and comedian Seth Green has lost four non-fungible tokens (NFTs) worth more than $300,000 in a phishing attack.
The stolen pieces were from popular, high-value NFT collections, including Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, and Doodles. Altogether, the hackers made off with about 145 Ethereum, or over $300,000 worth of non-fungible tokens.
“Well frens it happened to me. Got phished and had 4 NFTs stolen,” said Green in a tweet. He pleaded with the cryptocurrency community to refrain from buying the four NFTs as he worked to resolve the issue.
But the hackers immediately sold the digital artwork. The Bored Ape was sold for more than $200,000 and the Mutant Ape for $42,000. As of press time, the other two NFTs were worth about $26,000 each, according to their collection’s floor price.
Green has identified one buyer
Green, who has starred in a number of high-profile Hollywood productions like the Italian Job and Austin Powers, appeared to have identified one buyer, who describes himself on Twitter as a street photographer.
“@DarkWing84 looks like you bought my stolen ape- hit me up so we can fix it,” the 48-year-old actor pleaded. Green never got a response, at least not publicly. NFT marketplace OpenSea has since marked the stolen work as suspicious, preventing the NFTs from being bought or sold.
Phishing scams becoming rife in crypto
Phishing comes in several forms but generally involves an attacker luring unsuspecting victims into revealing sensitive information or visiting a booby-trapped website.
Users typically receive emails or messages supposedly from a trusted wallet provider requesting they change their passwords or seed phrase.
Once this information is in the hands of the hacker, they will then use that to create new log-in credentials and steal funds.
This is what happened with Seth Green. The actor revealed that he was attempting to buy a Gutter Clone NFT, an imitation of the popular Gutter Cats collection. Green connected his wallet to the site, which turned out to be a fake website.
“Phishing link looked clean,” he confessed. The non-fungible tokens were stolen more than a week back, according to a record of transactions on Green’s wallet address.
A non-fungible token is an immutable and unique unit of data stored on the blockchain. NFTs can be used to represent items such as photos, videos, audio, and other types of digital files.
NFTs have brought up novel possibilities in the curation and circulation of art and swayed fascinated endorsements from pop celebrities such as Snoop Dogg, Paris Hilton, Madonna, and others.
Considered by some as the wild west of the blockchain industry, non-fungible tokens have also started to draw criminals into the space. in Feb, OpenSea users reportedly lost 254 NFTs, collectively worth $1.7 million, in a phishing attack.
Security experts said all of the tokens stolen had valid signatures of users, meaning they had been misled into sharing their signatures with strangers through clicking links or chasing promotions.