The official Bored Ape Yacht Club Instagram account was hacked on Monday and millions of dollars worth of NFTs were reportedly stolen, according to a tweet shared by the company on April 25.
Bored Ape is a collection of 10,000 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) minted on the Ethereum blockchain featuring profile pictures of cartoon apes generated by an algorithm. Bored Ape Yacht Club makes money issuing new digital artwork and by royalties from secondary sales and other transactions.
In April 2021, when the Bored Ape Yacht Club launched, its mint price was 0.08 ETH — about $192 at the time. Today, the collection’s floor price, the price of the least valuable NFT, is 136.69 ETH or $392,911.07, according to Coingecko.
“There is no mint going on today. It looks like BAYC Instagram was hacked. Do not mint anything, click links, or link your wallet to anything,” said Bored Ape Yacht Club in the tweet.
It is not clear how much was stolen in the phishing attack, which used a fake “airdrop” promotion that promised people free tokens if they connected their MetaMask wallets to a site linked through the post.
The warning seems to have come too late. About 44 people fell for the scam, according to Molly White, creator of Web3 Is Going Great, a project “to track how things in the blockchains/crypto/web3 technology space aren’t actually going as well as its proponents might like you to believe.”
Some 133 NFTs valued at more than $3 million were stolen from their owners, according to White.
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Other say 91 NFTs valued at about $2.8 million were reported stolen, based on the floor price of the respective collections, according to The Block.
Among the stolen items are four Bored Apes, six Mutant Apes and three Bored Ape Kennel Club NFTs, the report said.
Crypto enthusiasts were surprised to learn that an Instagram hack could lead to such a huge loss of NFTs. NFTs have increasingly been the target of hackers.
In January, OpenSea, a marketplace for non-fungible tokens, froze $2.2 million worth of Bored Ape NFTs after the owner reported them stolen.
“The hacker got into IG, created a fake ad for the BAYC land sales, and spoofed their wallets to steal the NFT’s,” Twitter user @Crypto_force24 explained as the news broke out about the hack and loss.
Bored Ape Yacht Club owner Yuga Labs claimed in a statement that two-factor authentication was enabled on the Instagram account, a security measure that should have made unauthorized access to the account extremely difficult.
Yuga Labs was valued at $5 billion in February after it entered talks with billionaire investor Andreessen Horowitz.
Image: Yuga Labs LLC, 101 Bored Ape Yacht Club (est. 2021), Courtesy of Sotheby’s