Malicious links were posted on the internet imitating the recent collaboration between Beeple and Louis Vuitton. The links were suggestive of fake Louis Vuitton NFT raffles.
Phishing attacks have been going on in the industry for some time now, and the rate at which the attacks come seems to be on the increase. As part of this phishing scam, Mike Winkelmann, a digital artist and famous non-fungible token (NFT) creator, who is also known as Beeple, had his Twitter hacked on Sunday, May 22nd.
Scammers’ calculative move
To prevent the common scam activities that happen with phishing accounts, a security analyst at Metamask, Harry Denley, promptly alerted users that Beeple’s account had been hacked. The hacked account had a link to a raffle of a Louis Vuitton NFT collaboration on its profile and clicking on it would drain users of valuables in their wallets.
From analysis, the scammers seem to be very calculative with their move, as it is suspected that they probably want to capitalise on Beeple’s recent collaboration with Louis Vuitton. Earlier this month, there was a collaboration between both parties.
Upon hacking, phishing links that lead to fake Beeple collections have been posted continually. It has a bait of a promise of a free mint for unique NFTs attached to it, so as to get unsuspecting users.
For a time not less than five hours, the phishing links were up on Beeple’s Twitter, and just as planned for the scammer, he scored some points during that time. On-chain analysis of one of the scammers’ wallets shows that the first link got about $73,000 as it scored 36 Ethereum.
The second link got much more, netting about $365,000 worth of ETH and NFTs from collections of high value such as VeeFriends and Mutant Ape Yatch, among others. These two links scammed users about $438,000.
Data from on-chain analysis shows that the scammer sold the NFTs on Open Sea and put the stolen money in a mixer, so as to launder the gains.
Beeple eventually got hold of his account. He confirmed this via a tweet. Beeple is very notable in the crypto world as he has created three out of the ten most expensive NFTs ever sold. One of the NFTs had a high selling price of $69.3 million. All of these have made him a target for phishing attacks.
