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You’ll Be Shocked To Learn That Someone Calling Themselves ‘ILovePonzi’ Spent A Fortune On Those Dumb Ape NFTs And Had Them All Stolen By Hackers

Much like cryptocurrency, NFTs are a rising digital trend that can’t help seeming awfully dodgy, and just because Gwyneth Paltrow and Paris Hilton are into them. The same day that some artists discovered that non-fungible tokens were being made without their consent, word broke that a collector of the fad got scammed out of their collection of JPEGs depicting apes and mutants.

As per Vice, the collector, who goes by larrylawliet (though their handle is “@iloveponzi,” which is all but begging con artists to scam him), appears to have been tricked into granting hackers access to his crypto wallet. A cybersecurity researcher told Vice that, after looking at larrylawliet’s blockchain transactions, “it appears larrylawliet gave access to his NFTs to what they likely thought was a dAPP or distributed app, perhaps to help them trade the images. The problem is that it wasn’t actually a dApp, but an individual’s wallet, which proceeded to drain larrylawliet’s wallet of all their NFTs.”

After getting access to the cyrpto waller, the hacker(s) proceeded to steal seven NFTs: one from the Bored Ape Yacht Club, five from the Mutant Ape Yacht Club, and one Doodle. The hackers then sold them for a total of $700,000. That, larrylawliet said, was far less than they were worth; they claimed they were worth something in the area of $2.7 million.

This has become an all-too-common scam in the cryptocurrency world, while NFT heists are on the rise. And it’s a reminder that the world of NFTs, especially when combined with cryptocurrency, is so questionable even Kanye West is steering clear.

(Via Vice)