Thieves Steal Gallery Owner’s Multimillion-Dollar NFT Collection – ARTnews.com

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“I have been hacked. All my apes gone. This just sold please help me,” wrote gallery own­er Todd Kramer, of New York’s Ross + Kramer Gallery, in a since-delet­ed tweet post­ed on Decem­ber 30.

A phish­ing scam had drained his Ethereum wal­let of 15 NFTs val­ued at a total of $2.2 mil­lion, includ­ing four apes from the “Bored Ape Yacht Club” col­lec­tion. The thief seemed to have sold off many of the pieces in Kramer’s col­lec­tion, and Twit­ter users jeered at Kramer’s bad luck, point­ing out that he had bet on an unreg­u­lat­ed, decen­tral­ized sys­tem that would be unable to help him.

“Man If only there had been some kind of Reg­u­lat­ing author­i­ty in place that could like Insure your invest­ments against theft and fraud,” wrote one user with the han­dle @anarchy_shark.

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An NFT, or nonfungible token, is

But in the end, an author­i­ty did come through. With the help of the buy­ers and the NFT plat­form OpenSea, Kramer was able to get back sev­er­al of his NFTs. Five hours after his orig­i­nal post, he wrote, in a tweet that has also since been delet­ed, “Update.. All Apes are frozen„. Wait­ing for opensea team to get in„,lessons learned. Use a hard wallet…”

OpenSea’s involve­ment sparked major con­tro­ver­sy, with some alleg­ing that NFTs could not tru­ly be decen­tral­ized if it had “frozen” some, ren­der­ing them unsellable on the plat­form. Oth­ers point­ed out that OpenSea had only frozen user’s abil­i­ty to inter­act with the NFT through that one site alone—they could still be bought and sold elsewhere.

Nei­ther OpenSea nor Kramer respond­ed to requests for comment.

Phish­ing scams have become more fre­quent as NFTs have increased in val­ue. How­ev­er, most savvy users can pro­tect them­selves by using hard wal­let, also known as a cold wal­let, which is phys­i­cal and only con­nects to the inter­net when plugged in and engaged. Kramer had been using a so-called hot wal­let, which is con­tin­u­ous­ly con­nect­ed to the inter­net and thus more vulnerable.

More com­mon than phish­ing scams, how­ev­er, is theft of a dif­fer­ent kind. Some peo­ple have begun mak­ing NFTs of art that they did not cre­ate, an issue for which no easy fix has yet been developed.

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