A thief has made off with "millions of dollars" worth of non-fungible tokens tied to the Bored Ape Yacht Club series after the group's Instagram account (parent company Meta, (NASDAQ: FB)) was hacked.
"There is not mint going on today," Bored Ape Yacht Club tweeted (NASDAQ: TWTR) earlier this week. "It looks like BAYC Instagram was hacked. Do not mint anything, click links, or link your wallet to anything."
According to reports, the hacked Instagram account was used to make a phishing post that claimed to allow BAYC users to "mint land" in the upcoming OthersideMeta. Users were prompted to connect their MetaMask crypto wallets to the hacker's in the link on the post for an "airdrop" to claim their land but had their wallets emptied after connecting. Estimates on the value of the stolen assets vary; the lowest end appears to be $1 million, with a reasonable middle ground of around $3 million, and earlier speculative estimates ranging as high as $17 million.
Yuga Labs' Bored Ape Yacht Club, notorious for its aesthetically questionable algorithm-generated monkeys, has been the subject of several notable hacks since its inception. Thefts of the assets have become so prominent that BYAC was even a Twitter meme briefly, with users riffing on variations of "all my apes gone." However, the NFT and crypto scene has been rife with fraud and hacking in general.
OpenSea, a major blockchain trading platform, was hit by a similar phishing attack that pilfered $1.7 million in tokens; hundreds of tokens had been stolen as opposed to the dozen or so lost in the recent hack, though most were lower value. In a much larger heist earlier this year, the popular Axie Infinity blockchain game, which features NFTs and trading as a core component, was hacked for $500 million worth of tokens. "Credit-based stablecoin" Beanstalk was hacked recently as well, losing $182 million after having its wallets drained.