As the community reclaims stolen NFTs, the hacker gets a taste of his own medicine
At the height of the NFT craze, stories of traders being conned out of their nonfungible tokens were prevalent. In an unusual turn of events, the Solana community banded together to “scam” a fraudster in order to recover stolen NFTs. It all started with the cross-chain gaming development firm Uncharted NFT’s Discord channel being hacked, with fraudsters draining 109 user wallets.
The con artists made off with more than 150 SOL tokens and 25 World of Solana (WOS) NFTs, including three rare and costly digital treasures. WOS is a collection of 2,222 different heroines, the most costly of which costs 123 SOL ($5,600). The collection’s current floor price is 2.03 SOL. Following the incident, the community decided to recover the stolen NFTs.
The WOS team contacted their development partner, Cyberfrog, on Twitter, and agreed to increase royalties on stolen NFTs from the normal 5% to 98 percent. The community was encouraged to keep an eye out for any new listings on the Solana NFT marketplace MagicEden. Within two days, the scammer fell for the trap, and the community was able to reclaim 15 NFTs, while the remaining 10 sniped. Sniping is the practice of making a winning offer in the last seconds of an NFT auction. This approach is intended to keep other NFT buyers from outbidding you before the auction concludes.
The community was able to recover the remaining ten sniped NFTs as well as the 25 WOS NFTs and restore them to their proper owners. The community was also urged to “always use a burner wallet and be careful while minting,” according to a Twitter thread documenting the events of the breach and the community’s efforts to recover them all. The little NFT community has already retaliated against fraudsters twice.
Read more: After gaining access to Beeple’s Twitter account, a hacker stole $438K in cryptocurrency and NFTs.
