A rapid rise in popularity has driven up the average price of CryptoPunks NFT by 53 percent in within one week. Its price surged from $87,000 (34 ETH) on July 24 to a huge $135,000 (52 ETH) yesterday.
Scammers became hungry as a result of the fervent enthusiasm in the NFT space. An NFT videogame founder, according to reports, has already been a victim of a bot fraud on the CryptoPunks Discord group.
Game Founder Stazie Scammed
On August 1, scammers stole 16 CryptoPunk NFTs from Hedgie creator and developer Stazie (pseudonym), including some ETH (CRYPTO: ETH). The entire value of stolen assets is estimated to be in the millions of dollars.
Yesterday, Stazie uncovered the deception in a series of tweets. He described how things were quite regular for him before the robbery and how they drastically changed afterward. “The whole thing happened like a horrific dream,” he wrote, unable to fathom the incident. He narrated his horrible experience:
“I was lying in bed yesterday evening, mind was very foggy, casually browsing. Saw this bot in Discord and clicked the link. The site looked like Cryptopunks, and had a popup that looked like Metamask…”
4/9 The domain of course is fake, it’s .to instead of .com
The whole thing happened like a bad dream, almost felt like I was hypnotized. There was zero critical thinking, and this is beyond idiotic. The punks and ETH was quickly gone before I could do anything.
— stazie (@stazie) July 31, 2021
As the project celebrates its fourth anniversary, a fraudster known as “cryptopunksbot” placed an offering on the CryptoPunk Discord service advertising an opportunity to win ten very unique NFT avatars.
After receiving a fraudulent message about his Metamask wallet’s security being breached, Stazie logged onto a fake website and input his twelve-word seed phrase in the hopes of winning the unique avatars. The scammer took Stazie’s wallet within seconds after texting the phrase.
On Larva Labs, the scammer’s wallet, which now includes 10 CryptoPunks, is accessible.
Yesterday, the scammer sold 5 CryptoPunks NFTs for 149 ETH ($385,000).
They also transferred one CryptoPunk to another wallet yesterday night, which Stazie still uses as his Twitter profile picture.
Stazie has been involved in cryptocurrency since 2017 and considers himself to be well-versed in the methods used to defraud investors of their funds and NFTs. He attributes his loss in judgment at the moment to “being burnt out, tired and frustrated.”
Related article | The Ongoing NFT Heists: Will It Ever Stop?
NFT Thieves Are Now A Staple Of The Market
The NFT market has reached new heights in the recent week, as markets have seen record-breaking transfers. These digital artifacts saw a lot of movement over the weekend.
On Saturday and Sunday, one of the largest markets, OpenSea, saw the highest day trade volumes ever, with $35 million and $49 million respectively.
Like cryptocurrencies, NFTs contain ownership details for easy identification and transfer of tokens between the holders. Each digital asset can be easily tracked. Owners or artists can even sign their digital signatures on their digital artworks in the metadata.
However, as with other forms of analog media, duplication and theft abounds. But since NFTs are made to be recorded on the blockchain, they can’t easily be erased off record. That makes them easily verifiable even after a purchase has been completed on a stolen NFT. The public ledger the blockchain offers still serves as protection for artists to easily get their works removed once it’s confirmed stolen.
ETH/USD seems to be back in bull phase. Source: TradingView
Related article | NFTs In A Nutshell: A Weekly Review
Featured Image from iStockPhoto, Charts from TradingView