- Brooklyn District Attorney advises artists about fake NFT platforms and scams.
- Scammers steal digital assets by imitating reputable NFT websites.
The office of the District Attorney in Brooklyn is ramping up efforts against fraudulent non-fungible token operations after the disturbing case of an 85-year-old artist who was duped out of his life savings. Seeking to join the booming NFT market, the artist went and fell prey to a scam NFT platform. The platform shamelessly imitated OpenSea, one of the world’s leading marketplaces.
They persuaded the artist to emboss his work onto the website. They assured him that the revenues would exceed $300,000 in sales. The scammers informed him it would require a fee of $135,000 to repay him. In an extraordinary action, the artist withdrew money from his retirement accounts, he charged up all the credit cards possible, he borrowed additional money to cover the fee.
NFT Scam Reveals Dangers in Digital Art Market
The Brooklyn District Attorney, Eric Gonzalez said this was not an isolated scam. He added that while conducting the investigation, detectives identified 40 fake websites of a similar nature, that impersonate artists and target them by way of this exact same scam. From there, the hackers accessed victims’ digital assets and took money.
They traced the stolen money to Nigeria, where criminals exchanged it for Naira, making recovery almost impossible. During their investigation, they discovered that criminals managed and funded fake websites from Nigeria. They also traced two other victims, artists from Georgia and California, through this scam.
To this end, the DA’s Office shut down the phishing sites and warned NFT artists to not go on a site that’s not legit or to give out the seed phrases of their crypto wallet so assets are not compromised.
In some ways, it seems like an FBI warning back in 2023 saying how many cyber criminals emerged using the guise of legit NFT developers and exploiting the vulnerabilities to dupe the victims.