Bored Ape Club Instagram hacked, NFTs stolen
The hacker has reportedly walked away with NFTs worth millions
Image: BAYC
On Monday, April 25, the Instagram account of the popular NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) was hacked. According to BAYC, the hacker conducted a phishing scheme that resulted in the theft of millions of dollars in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) from the account's followers.
The BAYC collection consists of 10,000 NFTs of computer-generated apes made by Yuga Labs. Having launched last April, the Apes have become immensely popular, with the entire collection driving global sales of over $1 billion.
It's unclear how the hacker gained access to the project's Instagram account. "At the time of the hack, two-factor authentication was enabled and security surrounding the IG account followed best practices," Yuga Labs said in a statement on Twitter.
"We’ve regained control of the account, and are investigating how the hacker gained access, with IG’s team.” Yuga Labs also added that the team was working hard to reach out to impacted users and advised community members to stay away from the scam.
The hacker reportedly utilized the hacked account to send community members to a bogus BAYC webpage that advertised a fake airdrop. The hacker then claimed to be offering access to a future Bored Ape project and invited users to link their MetaMask crypto wallets to the site. Users' digital assets were drained out of their wallets and transferred to the hacker's wallet when they did so.
