“There is no mint going on today,” the NFT project wrote on
Twitter. “It looks like BAYC Instagram was hacked. Do not mint anything, click
links or link your wallet to anything.”
🚨There is no mint going on today. It looks like BAYC Instagram was hacked. Do not mint anything, click links, or link your wallet to anything.
— Bored Ape Yacht Club (@BoredApeYC) April 25, 2022
The fraudulent social media link said users could mint
“land” in the upcoming OthersideMeta, which is due to launch later this week
and those who clicked the link had their wallets compromised, the report says,
transferring Bored Apes and Mutant Apes transferred to new wallets by the
hackers.
The hackers stole about 24 Bored Apes and 30 Mutant Apes
totaling $13.7 million in value, according to recent OpenSea transfers, with
CoinDesk noting some of those transfers may represent holders transferring
their non-fungible tokens for security purposes. Yuga Labs says the attack is
far smaller.
“The hacker posted a fraudulent link to a copycat of the
Bored Ape Yacht Club website, where a safeTransferFrom attack asked users to
connect their MetaMask to the scammer's wallet in order to participate in a
fake Airdrop,” a spokesperson told CoinDesk by email.
“At 9:53am ET, we alerted our community, removed all links
to Instagram from our platforms and attempted to recover the hacked Instagram
account,” the spokesperson said.
Yuga Labs and Instagram are still investigating how the
account was compromised, the spokesperson said, adding that 4 Bored Apes, 6
Mutant Apes and 3 BAKC and other NFTs estimated at a total value of about $3
million were stolen.
Earlier this month, hackers “briefly compromised” Bored Ape
Yacht Club’s NFT collection through chat servers on messaging platform Discord
and attempted to trick users into minting fake tokens.