Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Instagram Hacked, NFTs Stolen In Phishing Attack

Bored Ape Yacht Club said its Instagram was hacked earlier this week, resulting in a number of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) being stolen. 

BAYC said the hackers used its Instagram account to upload a phishing post to its followers, promoting an Airdrop. 

Clicking through on it would result in users giving control of their wallets to the hackers. 

🚨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 co-founder of BAYC said 4 Apes were stolen, as well as other assorted NFTs.

The floor price of an Ape on OpenSea is 142ETH, or about US$402,600.

The IG hack resulted in 4 Apes, 6 Mutants, 3 Kennels, and some other assorted valuable NFTs being lost. We will be in contact with the users affected and will post a full post mortem on the attack when we can. For now I would like to stress that 2FA was enabled on the account. https://t.co/bsc3tHt9QG

— Garga.eth (@CryptoGarga) April 25, 2022

A spokesperson for Yuga Labs, the collective behind BAYC, told Coindesk an estimated US$3 million worth of NFTs was lost. 

Yuga Labs said an investigation into the hack was currently underway, and said two-factor authentication was enabled at the time of the attack. 

The 2FA process would have required users to provide two different authentication factors to verify themselves. 

The Verge noted that NFTs are often held in smartphone wallets because the popular crypto wallet app MetaMask only supports NFT display on your mobile. 

The move means phishing links are more likely to be accessed from someone using a mobile wallet. 

The Bored Ape Yacht Club is one of the well-known NFT collections out there – it’s estimated that the cumulative sales of Apes stand at over US$1.8 billion. 

Celebrities like Eminem and Justin Bieber have bought its works.

This account @ProDutaFC is attempting to scam people. As always: never trust DMs, never type your seedphrase, and always be EXTREMELY suspicious of all links – especially if they ask you to connect your wallet. pic.twitter.com/UmkV5scXS9

— Garga.eth (@CryptoGarga) February 27, 2022

This isn’t the first time BAYC has been compromised – earlier this month, its official Discord channel, along with several other NFTs Discords, were hacked in another phishing scam in which users were tricked into clicking a link to mint a fake NFT.

*Featured image from OpenSea

By Samantha Chan \ 10:00, 29 April 2022