Users who purchased the NFTs from the CryptoBatz collection, created by heavy metal singer Ozzy Osbourne, are unfortunately falling victim to attacks. According to the portal The Verge, it is a phising attack, which consists of stealing users’ assets.
Collection of 9,666 bat NFTs was released on January 21 and sold out within minutes. However, just two days after the tokens were minted, supporters are being targeted by a scam that stole NFTs from their wallets.
According to The Verge, this was due to an exchange on the collection’s official website on the Discord platform. Currently accessed through the link discord.gg/cryptobatz, but had previously been accessed through a slightly different URL – discord.gg/cryptobatznft.
While the exchange was taking place, the scammers appropriated the old address and used it as the URL of a fake website. Whoever accessed this site received a message asking to enter the private data of their wallet.
By doing this, the user ended up giving access to the entire contents of the wallet and then the theft took place. It is estimated that at least 1,300 users were affected and lost their NFTs.
Users report losses; NFT creator responds
One of those affected by the scam was Tim Silman, a non-profit professional. He did not say whether he lost an NFT, but estimates he lost between $300 and $400 worth of ETH. Silman claimed that he accessed the fake link through a post on the CryptoBatz website.
Apparently, the publication still didn’t have the updated link, which ended up leading Silman to the coup.
“I’ve seen at least a dozen people on Twitter voicing this same issue. If you look at etherscan transactions, others lost a lot more than I did,” he said.
In fact, one of the addresses mentioned by Silman and linked to the scammers received a series of incoming transactions, totaling 14.6 ETH. On Tuesday (25), the address sent these assets to another wallet which, at the time of writing this text, has 74.6 ETH.
Silman stated that he reported the fraud to the project team, but that they were slow to respond. He also stated that he knew other people who were victims of the coup.
“Jepeggi”, the co-founder of Sutter Systems, the company behind Cryptobatz, sent an email to The Verge explaining the situation. He said it was not Sutter’s responsibility, but Discord’s lack of control.
“While we are very sorry for the people who fell victim to these scams, we cannot take responsibility for the actions of scammers who exploit Discord — a platform over which we have absolutely no control. In our opinion this situation and hundreds of others that have occurred on other projects in the NFT space could have been easily avoided if Discord had a better response/support/fraud team to help large projects like ours.”
