Company recovers and returns three NFTs stolen in OpenSea attack

Mintable is one of OpenSea’s main competitors in the NFT market. However, the company this time acted as a giant contributor and recovered 3 NFTs stolen in a recent OpenSea attack. and returned them to their rightful owners.

Who confirmed the information was Zach Burks, co-founder of Mintable. He explained that the recovered NFTs belong to the collection called Azuki. The three copies – Azuki #1178, #4176 and #1180 – were acquired for around 13.35 ETH.

Mintable then contacted the original owners of the NFTs and the works were returned.

Mintable “fixes” OpenSea crash

According to Burke, the purchase of the stolen NFTs occurred completely by chance. Mintable initially intended to buy Azukis to carry out a fire sale an offer in which NFTs are sold below cost.

This sale has two purposes. The first is to benefit Mintable customers with higher profits, while the second is to give the platform more exposure. When they checked out the purchased Azukis, however, they realized they came from the OpenSea theft.

The Mintable team found the NFTs on the LooksRare website, which does not enjoy a good reputation. The site, according to Burks, has a reputation for selling stolen NFTs. In fact, the three NFTs found were marked by OpenSea as targets for the hacker who attacked the platform.

Burks identified this lock and verified the transactions on the blockchain, confirming that the NFTs were stolen. He looked for information on Twitter, but did not find an OpenSea position regarding the search for NFTs.

“I started looking on twitter and found that no one got any response from OpenSea about what they were going to do. Unfortunately, it seems that even though they have $1 billion in cash, they can’t solve a $1.7 million problem and refund their users,” Burks said.

The $1.7 million figure refers to the total value of NFTs stolen from OpenSea. One was the exclusive Bored Ape Yatch Club (BAYC) collection, whose owner has filed a $1 million lawsuit against OpenSea.

Devin Finzer, founder of OpenSea, has denied responsibility for the hack and claims that the intrusion was external and did not result from a problem with the site. In contrast, Burks said Mintable took the action to help the Azuki owner community.

“We like the Azuki community. We want to help people who lost over $140K from this failure get their money back.”

This weekend when buying azukis for our fire sale (selling below floor for free profit to users) we discovered some of the stolen @AzukiZen from the opensea hackb…

We decided to buy them and give them back to who they were stolen from. Here's what happened

1/🧵 https://t.co/cNhIvCMhso

— Zach Burks (@ZachSpaded) February 23, 2022

Past security issues

NFT theft issues are just one more of OpenSea’s recent security flaws. While it is the world’s largest NFT-selling site, the platform has already suffered from a glitch that, in January, allowed hackers to steal $750,000 worth of ETH.

Because of this flaw, many users took huge losses on their NFTs. One of them saw his Bored Ape sell for 92% off, at a ridiculously low price. Others suffered similar losses, which led to OpenSea having to reimburse the losses.