Reports from a local source revealed that a sum of $438k worth of crypto and FT was recently stolen from unsuspecting victims in a fake raffle scam. The perpetrator was said to have hacked into a famous NFT artist, Mike Winkelmann’s twitter account to carry out the phishing scheme.
Victims Had Lost $438,000 In NFTs and Crypto Before It Was Stopped
Furthermore, the reports said the account was hijacked on May 22 and that Harry Denley had quickly alerted twitter users of the ongoing raffle scam. Harry is MetaMask’s security specialist, he took to his twitter handle to inform the general public that Mike’ account has been hacked. He continued that the attackers had pasted a fake link to a gift from Louis Vuitton NFT collection which when clicked would drain victims of their crypto wallet.
The scam was based on the recently sealed partnership between Louis Vuitton Luxury Fashion firm and Beeple, a popular NFT manufacturing firm. The NFT firm had recently created a 30 NFT collection for the luxury fashion brand’s mobile game which was named “Louis The Game.” The game was designed to reward its players.
The perpetrator was reported to have continuously posted the links from the hacked account for about five hours. Moreso, Onchain data analysis tracked down 36 ETH stolen funds to one of the wallets used by the scammers for the raffle scam. 36 ETH was about $76,000 at press time.
Another link was recorded to have secured about $365,000 in ETH and NFTs from famous collections like the VeeFreinds, MAYC and others. The total of the stolen fund was summed up to be $438,000.
The analysis also revealed that the scammer is trying to sell the stolen NFTs on OpenSea and has also transferred the acquired Ethereum to a crypto mixer wallet in a bid to launder their loot.
Beeple Recovered His Account
Sometime later, some tweets popped up from the hacked Beeple account stating that the crypto artist had successfully recovered his account from the scammers. Through the post, reminded his followers to beware of offers that are too sweet to be real as they have a 100% chance of being scams.
Beeple holds the reputation for creating the most expensive NFT that was sold to a single holder at $69.3 million. He has two more NFTs that rank among the top ten most expensive NFTs.
A similar scam case once occurred in Nov. 2021 when a scammer hacked Beeple’s Discord account to post similar phishing links. The link raked in about 38 ETH from unsuspecting victims.
Recently, Malwarebytes, revealed that there is a significant rise in the phishing attempts recently made by scammers in the NFT industry. The cyber security company added that the most common method used by the fraudsters is to portray fake websites as legit ones.