Popular American Digital Artist and renowned in the Nonfungible tokens (NFTs) space, Mike Winkelmann, commonly recognized as Beeple, had his Twitter account compromised yesterday to post phishing websites.
Popular NFT Artist’s Twitter Account Hacked in Phishing Scam
In the early hours of yesterday, Harry Denley (@sniko_ on Twitter) who is the security analyst at MetaMask, notified the community that the Twitter account belonging to Beeple, a popular digital artist in the NFT world, had been hacked and compromised with attempt to steal funds from followers through a phishing scam.
https://twitter.com/sniko_/status/1528320829741842432
Beetle is popularly known for his record-breaking sale of the unique ‘5000 days’ NFT piece for $69M at auction.
On the NFT creator’s Twitter account, the hacker posted a tweet about a collection that Beeple had supposedly been working on in collaboration with Louis Vuitton and that they had released a thousand pieces of unique NFTs together while leaving the fake link to the collection on his Twitter bio.
“Been working on this with LV for a long time behind the scenes. 1000 unique pieces. BEEPLE x VUITTON COLLECTION_1: BEEPLES. Official Raffle draw below. 1 ETH=1 Raffle Entry. All non-winning entries are refunded post raffle.” The Beeple Twitter account Hacker tweeted.
Since there had been an earlier announcement about Beeple’s collaboration with Louis Vuitton, the hackers chose to use that to scam the Beeple-trusting community. Earlier in May, the Artist designed 30 NFTs for the high-end fashion brand’s mobile game that was embedded as rewards for players in the game.
The scammer continually made posts concerning this fake collaboration to lure more of the artist’s trusting users to partake in the raffle draw and deposit ETH and other digital assets.
Harry explained in a thread how the phishing scam occurred. Once any user connects their wallet to partake in the fake auction, they will be initiating a contract that allows the scammer to mint ETH from their wallet.
https://twitter.com/sniko_/status/1528320843566170112?s=20&t=L3vjlVrG44N4qVWcLaJSrg
$438,000 Worth Digital Assets Stolen.
On-chain analysis of the scammers’ wallet, as posted by the MetaMask Security Analyst, showed that they took 36ETH in a first scam attempt and 62.35 ETH, 37.59 WETH and 45 NFTs. All these amount to approximately $438,000 stolen.
On-chain data further shows that the scammer is about to sell the NFTs on opens and putting the crypto in a crypto mixer to launder the funds.
