The developers of the most popular Bored Ape Yacht Club project on Monday announced that hackers had hacked into the official Instagram page and shared a link to a fake airdrop with the project’s subscribers.
The phishing attack coincided with the anniversary of the launch of the BAYC project, which increased the confidence of many users in the “imaginary drop”. Crypto enthusiasts who connected their MetaMask wallets to a fraudulent site lost their BAYC NFTs.
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According to some reports, about 100 NFTs were stolen, but some sources refer to 54 NFTs. The minimum price of each BAYC token is around 139 ETH ($400,726 at the time of writing), according to CoinGecko. Thus, over $40 million worth of NFTs may have been stolen as a result of the attack. However, this figure could be many times higher, since the losses were estimated at the minimum value of each token.
“No mint today. Looks like BAYC’s Instagram has been hacked. Do not follow the links and do not tie your wallets to anything,” the representatives of the project shared on Twitter.
At the time of publication of the article, it is still unknown how the hackers gained access to the project’s Instagram account. Some users note the importance of two-factor authentication as an effective means of protecting against unauthorized logins, while others, on the contrary, argue that the methods are not entirely reliable and can actually be compromised by replacing the SIM card.
This is not the first attack on the Bored Ape Yacht Club project this month. On April 1, BAYC’s Discord server was also hacked. Then, as a result of a phishing attack, NFTs were stolen from Taiwanese superstar Jay Chou worth about $550,000. Later, on April 5, one of the users also lost three tokens in a fake verification scam. So far, yesterday’s phishing attack was the largest in the history of the project.
Over the past year, Bored Ape Yacht Club has become the most popular and sought-after project in the cryptocurrency world. Sales hit the $1 billion mark last year, with over 38,748 ETH traded on the OpenSea marketplace last week. The project was preparing to launch its own metaverse, which should open its doors on April 30th. At the moment, apart from the teaser video with the announcement, little is known about the upcoming expansion of the project. It is also unknown how yesterday’s phishing attack will affect the plans of developers in the future.
