Bored Ape owners become victims as scammer steals 14 NFTs worth 385 ETH, around $1 million. The 1-month of social engineering shocks the community after analyst @Serpent shares the details of the whole process on Twitter.
From registering a fake domain name to faking partnerships, the scammer, aka Jason Brubeck, approached the victims by posing as a casting director of Forte Pictures. Although this LA-based Emmy award-winning firm exists legally, it had no involvement with the scammer.
Brubeck approached the victims asking them for IP rights permission for their Bored Ape NFTs for a film project called “The Return of Time” in partnership with Unemployd, an AI NFT platform, which is also a scam.
Once the victims agreed to it, the scammer started to make frequent phone calls, discussed the well-planned film, and even made fake legal contracts to pose as authentic.
Of course, this social engineering strategy was quite believable because they also created fake Bored Ape Twitter accounts and made it look as if people were signing up for this film project. Note that this took place for a whole month.
The victims were willingly convinced and agreed to give them IP rights. Later, the scammer emailed them to “sign the contract” on the Unemployd website as an agreement. As soon as the owners approved the access, the wallet got connected and was immediately drained out.
The clever social engineering has cost a million losses to the owners. No one would have doubted that someone would use a perfectly established company to create a fake identity and scam so many people.
The attacker has now deactivated their Twitter, the Unemployd account is also nowhere to be found.
Bored Ape Yacht Club is the best-selling NFT collection on OpenSea with each worth thousands of dollars. The project comes under the blue-chip collectibles as it is the most valuable among others.
