The previous article mentioned NFT in general, but in order to understand the scale of this theft of non-fungible token phenomenon, you should take a look at this definition, if you haven't already known it.
It is worth noting that, although you can take a snapshot of the screen. You will actually have the same image, which you could have bought for the money, it will not be over that originality, Because you will not have the rights of the owner, license, and its history, which are stored in the blockchain. However, formally the "picture" will be on your device.
In April 2022, a team of hackers decided to forge a new peak - to steal one of the most popular and expensive NFT collections 'Bored Ape Yacht Club'.
About the collection
These digital assets are stored and realized due to the Ethereum blockchain and contain close to 10000 unique pictures of moms, among which there are interpolated portraits of many celebrities. The Yuga Labs company worked on the development of the tokens.
Currently, this is one of the largest collections of OpenSea. And the value of one token for the history of the collection was over $1 billion.
Scam disclosure
The hackers decided to act as transparently as possible from the very beginning, and thanks to this, they did not attract tremendous attention from the world community at first.
The way of stealing the unique collection began with the well-known social network Instagram.
The hackers' goal was to gain access to MetaMask crypto wallets, which they obtained through a nondescript algorithm:
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They broke the official account of Yuga Labs and published a post about the free distribution of tokens
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They put the conditions for obtaining, where the main requirement was the authorization of the user and signing a smart contract to confirm the transaction.
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That's all, now all doors were closed to hackers because they had access to MetaMask cryptocurrencies of many users.
Though on the official page of Bored Ape Yacht Club on Twitter the company warned the admirers of the crime, it was too late, because the thieves were able to steal the sum of $ 3 million, including 4 monkeys from the collection.
How to sell stolen NFTs?
NFT are treated as art, and their sale is performed under the same scheme. Also, selling such a picture will not be easy, because nobody wants to go against the law and spend huge amounts of money on illegal, at least cultural, benefits.