Users of NFT marketplace Fractal – created by Twitch co-founder Justin Kan – lost £113,061 ($150,000) after its Discord bot was hacked to sell fraudulent NFTs.
The scammer targeted users in Fractal’s Discord server by hacking the server’s official bot. As detailed by journalist Zach Bussey on Twitter (thanks, Kotaku), the hacked Discord bot was used to advertise a limited amount of NFTs, with each one “selling” for one Solana (around £133) each.
This was of course a scam, and there were no NFTs being sold – victims were simply handing their money over for nothing. Fractal’s Discord server was soon flooded with upset users who had lost money in the scam, with one person asking for Fractal staff to reimburse their lost funds.
In total, the scammer made off with £113,061 from around 370 users before Fractal locked down its Discord server.
In response to the scam, Kan has announced that all users who lost money will be refunded. In a video, Kan called the incident a “super fucked up situation” and revealed Fractal is still trying to work out “exactly how that happened”.
Our @fractalwagmi server was hacked earlier today. Working on a fix and will refund everyone who lost $. pic.twitter.com/E1pQOotrFQ
— Justin Kan
(@justinkan) December 21, 2021
Sharing that “the good news, if there is any, was that it only affected 370 people,” Kan added some tips for NFT buyers looking to avoid being scammed, including “if something seems fishy, don’t jump into it”.
NFTs in general have been growing in popularity for scammers looking to make money. A fake Banksy NFT was sold for £244,000 after the buyer fell victim to an elaborate scam.
Similarly, the team behind Crazy Frog recently announced they would be launching NFTs, though noted “there have been quite a few fake, scam NFTs trying to use the Crazy Frog name in the past“.
Back in November, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said he was a “big believer” in NFTs but warned that “just because something is an NFT [it] doesn’t mean it’s worth anything“.
In other news, Amazon is revising its “internal processes” after a New World YouTuber was hit with a copyright strike for reporting a bug.
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