Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of non-fungible (NFT) Bored Ape Yacht Club tokens were stolen by hackers. The tokens were stolen after hackers broke into BAYC's Instagram account and launched a phishing attack targeting its followers.
BAYC disclosed the theft of the NFT via Twitter on Monday (25/4) morning. They warn community members to be on the lookout for phishing attacks circulating.
"At 9:53 a.m. ET, we alerted our community, removed all links to Instagram from our platform and tried to recover the hacked Instagram account," a BAYC spokesperson said.
The hackers allegedly used the hacked Instagram account to redirect community members to the fake BAYC site. The site was used to advertise the new airdrop. Airdrops are a crypto marketing technique where companies will distribute newly minted tokens for free to increase engagement.
In this case, the hacker claims to offer access to the new Bored Ape project and asks users to connect their MetaMask crypto wallet to the site. However, after being linked, the site actually stole all digital assets from the user's wallet and transferred them to the hacker's wallet.
In total, there were 134 NFTs with an estimated value of USD 3 million transferred to hackers' wallets, and some of them were Bored Ape assets.
"The rough estimate of losses due to fraud is 4 Bored Apes, 6 Mutant Apes and 3 BAKC (Bored Ape Kennel Club), as well as various other NFTs estimated to be worth a total of US$3 million," a BAYC spokesperson said.
Each of the stolen Bored Ape tokens was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The lowest priced token, Ape #7203, was last sold four months ago for 47.9 ETH or around USD 138,000. While the most expensive token is Ape #6623 which was sold three months ago for 123 ETH or around USD 354,500.
It is not known how BAYC's Instagram account was accessed by hackers. A BAYC spokesman said they had implemented all security protocols, including enabling two-factor authentication.
"We have regained control of the account, and are investigating how the hacker was able to gain access to the IG team," said BAYC.