Scammers in the crypto industry are remarkably adept at stealing highly valuable NFTs. A Bored Ape owner who goes by the username ‘s27’ recently lost NFTs worth over $567,000 after falling prey to a simple fraud.
As Twitter user 0xQuit explained in a Twitter thread, s27’s situation stands out since the user transferred their ape “from his vault to another wallet, just to lose it shortly thereafter.”
According to 0xQuit, the victim s27 lost BAYC #1584 and two Mutant Ape derivatives #13168 and #13169 to the fraudster.
BAYC #1584 NFT is one of the only 119 bubblegum apes. It also sports Bayc T Red cloths and only 140 apes have the similar trait too. The rarity score of this ape is 111.99 out of 10,000, so obviously it’s one of the most valuable apes.
Through a third-party service called swapkiwi, s27 engaged in a direct swap exchange with the scammer. Platforms like swapkiwi, unlike traditional marketplaces like OpenSea, allow direct NFT exchanges between collectors thereby, lowering gas expenses.
The scammer instead put up counterfeit NFTs in return for s27’s genuine Bored Ape and Mutant Apes. The scammer created false replicas using real Bored Ape images and uploaded them to OpenSea.
Swapkiwi’s display of validated NFTs was exploited by the attacker. Because the green checkmark is displayed within the image, scammers can easily counterfeit this verification by photoshopping a checkmark into an image of an ape, or any other NFT.
Swapkiwi, according to 0xQuit, should easily make some basic adjustments for their user interface to prevent this from happening again, albeit scammers are continually coming up with new methods.
Also there’s no option to verify the asset or asset contract in Swapkiwi so it makes verifying the NFTs extremely difficult.
0xQuit urged Swapkiwi to “Move the checkmark literally anywhere outside of the image itself, and add links to the asset contract and/or OpenSea page.”
Swapkiwi later responded, telling users to be careful while swapping. “We are working on the improvements” the platform added.
The scammer later sold the BAYC NFT for 98 WETH, approximately $337,000, much less from the current BAYC floor price of 111 ETH. Both Mutant Apes have also been sold for less than the collection’s floor price.
Scams and hacks have nearly taken over the NFT business. Every week, high-profile thefts of extremely valuable NFTs occur. Recently BAYC NFT #835 worth $350k got sold for just $115. The original holder later revealed that they got the ape transferred back from the whitehat hacker who stole the NFT by utilizing a phishing vulnerability.
