The image is by Alex Castro.
You can count on the project getting publicity when a pop-cultural icon announces an NFT collection. The launch of the "CryptoBatz" collection, a series of 9,666 digital bats, received coverage in a number of outlets.
Two days after the token was created, supporters are being targeted by a scam in which they are tricked into handing over their money.
Like the majority of NFT projects, CryptoBatz uses a place to organize its community. The short link for the official CryptoBatz Discord is discord.gg/cryptobatz. The project used a slightly different URL previously.
When the project switched to a new URL, a fake Discord server was set up. The old tweets from the man himself were left directing followers to a server controlled by the scam artists, not because he deleted them, but because he didn't.
:noupscale(cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorusasset/file/23185024)
A single post from the company received more than 4,000 retweets and hundreds of replies. On January 21st, the account was removed after being contacted by The Verge.
:noupscale(cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorusasset/file/23185029)
The number of people who could potentially have been fooled by the scam was shown in the invite panel for the fake Discord.
The bot spoofing the community management service Collab Land asked users to verify their assets in order to participate in the server, but instead directed them to a fake website where they were asked to connect their coins.
A person from Collab Land declined to speak.
:noupscale is a file on thechorusasset.com
Tim Silman lost money in the scam. Silman estimates that around $300–$400 in ETH was taken from his wallet after he visited a fake Discord server.
Silman said that he had seen at least a dozen people on the social networking site. Others lost more than me if you look at the transactions.
The address Silman indicated was linked to the scam received a number of incoming transactions on January 20th and sent them to a wallet containing more than $150,000.
Silman said that the project was slow to remove bad links.
He said that he had tagged them a few times, but no response. I suppose this is an expensive lesson.
The fake link was still present in a prominent post. The NFTs were being sold on OpenSea for over five thousand dollars.
This is an expensive lesson.
When asked if the project should take responsibility for leaving the old link online, Sutter Systems blamed the scam on Discord. The compromise was possible because of the easy setup and maintenance of the scam Discord instance, according to an email statement from the co-founder of Sutter Systems.
Although we feel very sorry for the people that have fallen prey to these scam, we can't take responsibility for the actions of scam artists exploiting the platform that we have no control over. The situation and hundreds of others that have taken place across other projects in the NFT space could have easily been prevented if Discord had a better response/support/fraud team in place to help big projects like ours.
It was aware of the incident and in contact with the affected team.
Peter Day, senior manager for corporate communications at Discord, said that their Trust and Safety team is in touch with the server owners. The team takes action when they are aware of attacks like this one.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
