Photo: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto (Getty Images)
The Instagram account of popular NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) was hacked Monday. According to BAYC itself, the hacker used the access to launch a phishing scheme that stole millions of dollars in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) from the account’s followers.
BAYC, operated by cryptocurrency firm Yuga Labs, uncovered what had happened on Twitter early Monday morning and warned community members to stay away from the scheme. In an email to Gizmodo, a BAYC spokesman confirmed details of the incident. “At 9:53 AM ET we alerted our community, removed all links to Instagram from our platforms and attempted to recover the hacked Instagram account,” they said.
The hacker allegedly used the compromised account to redirect community members to a fake BAYC website. There they advertised a fake airdrop. Airdrops are a crypto marketing technique in which companies send newly minted tokens to community members for free to encourage engagement with specific projects. In this case, the hacker claimed they were providing access to an upcoming Bored Ape project, Motherboard reports, and encouraged users to connect their MetaMask crypto wallets to the site. However, when users did, the website sucked the digital assets from their wallets and transferred them to the hacker’s wallet.
In total, about 134 NFTs appear to have been transferred to the hacker’s wallet as of Monday morning, some of which were Bored Ape assets, Motherboard reports.
“Rough estimated losses due to the scam are 4 bored monkeys, 6 mutated monkeys and 3 BAKC [Bored Ape Kennel Club], as well as various other NFTs with an estimated combined value of ~$3 million,” a BAYC spokesperson told Gizmodo. “We are actively working to establish contact with affected users.”
It is not at all clear how the hacker managed to break into BAYC’s Instagram account. “At the time of the hack, two-factor authentication was enabled and security around the IG account followed best practices,” tweeted BAYC claims On Monday. “We regained control of the account and are working with the IG team to investigate how the hacker gained access.”
We have reached out to Instagram for more details on this incident and will update our story when they respond.
BAYC is a collection of 10,000 unique NFTs of computer generated monkeys produced by Yuga Labs. Since launching last April, the monkeys have become wildly popular (and expensive), with the entire collection appearing to have grossed over $1 billion worldwide. Like other NFTs, the monkeys are inherently valuable because there are only 10,000 of them. The scarcity of wealth means some crypto fans are like a digital beanie baby willing to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for single pictures of a weirdly dressed monkey because there are few of them.