One click on the wrong link and they’re gone. Andreas Marshall (name changed by the editors) loses his Porsche NFTs, which he just bought at a high price, to a fraudster. He is one of more than twenty victims. The value of one of these NFTs: Around 2.5 Ethereum, the equivalent of almost $3,000. And Porsche? Does nothing.
On January 25, the car company will launch its first NFT collection. He wants to break into Web3 with 7,500 NFT models of the 911 Carrera, a legendary car. The starting shot is unfortunate. Only a fraction is minted due to lack of interest. On Twitter, people scoff at a lack of utility. Andreas Marshall is one of the buyers. And he’s really happy: Because Porsche promises, among other things, to raffle off a special experience among the NFT owners.
A few days later he gets a link for an airdrop from Porsche, supposedly from the car company itself. When he clicks on it, his NFT is sent to another wallet. The scammer sends this link to all original Porsche NFT owners. Over twenty of them click on it. When asked, Porsche told Marshall that the NFTs had been blocked. You can’t bring them back. Because transactions on the blockchain cannot be reversed. He should contact the police. The case will be forwarded internally for review.
Porsche and Co. should learn from this
“I was just sad,” says Marshall. “I don’t care about the money at all. I wanted to be part of the experience.” He’s been at Space for three years, not a newcomer. There is no compensation from Porsche. Only a quarter of all original NFTs were minted.
Marshall sees a lesson for the future in this case. More and more companies are penetrating the Web3. If the offer is to really pick up the mainstream, one must ensure that such scams do not happen so easily. “It might take a backdoor to undo something like that. Or you would have to disguise the addresses of the owners so that a scammer cannot easily send out false links to everyone,” says Marshall.
When asked by BTC-ECHO, Porsche’s press agency Road2Dreams replied: “The protection of our customers is always our top priority. That is why we regularly sensitize our customers to cases of fraud. Unfortunately, the transactions you mentioned were carried out off our website. So we can’t influence them.”
