Ozzy Osbourne’s NFT Company Got a Bunch of His Followers Scammed Out of Their Money

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“Others lost a lot more than me.”

Mr. Scamley

Scam­ming peo­ple out of thou­sands of dol­lars prob­a­bly wasn’t what rock star Ozzy Osbourne had in mind when he launched an NFT com­pa­ny last year, but that’s exact­ly what hap­pened this week in an appar­ent accident.

Osbourne’s Cryp­to­Batz — a ref­er­ence to the infa­mous inci­dent in which the “Crazy Train” singer ate a live bat on stage — describes itself as “col­lectible NFT batz cre­at­ed in LA” and we’re not going to lie, the black bat that appears to have been made to resem­ble to rock god him­self serv­ing as the account’s pro­file pho­to is actu­al­ly pret­ty cool.

But it wasn’t cool that the account tweet­ed out a phish­ing link in Decem­ber and, accord­ing to the Verge, didn’t take the tweet down until the pub­li­ca­tion asked the com­pa­ny for comment.

Vic­tims include Tim Sil­man, a non­prof­it employ­ee who lost mon­ey through the scam. Sil­man esti­mates around $300 and $400 in Ethereum was drained from his wal­let after he vis­it­ed the fake Dis­cord serv­er Cryp­to­Batz shared.

“I’ve seen at least a dozen peo­ple on Twit­ter voic­ing this same issue,” Sil­man told the Verge. “If you look at the trans­ac­tions on Ether­scan, oth­ers lost a lot more than me.”

Paranoid

Image cred­it: The Verge

The tweet has since been delet­ed, but the Verge’s screen­shot of it lives on.

Like many NFT projects, Cryp­to­Batz uses Dis­cord to orga­nize its com­mu­ni­ty, report­ed the Verge. The offi­cial Cryp­to­Batz Dis­cord is now locat­ed at discord.gg/cryptobatz, but used a slight­ly dif­fer­ent URL in the past. When they switched to the new URL, scam­mers set up a fake Dis­cord serv­er at the old one.

While Dis­cord and the NFT cre­ator Osbourne’s part­nered with gave the Verge a state­ment, there seems to be lit­tle legal recourse for affect­ed indi­vid­u­als. Can you imag­ine being robbed and not even being able to file an effec­tive police report?

Cryp­to was orig­i­nal­ly sup­posed to be about free­dom, redis­trib­ut­ing wealth and decen­tral­iz­ing finance and econ­o­my. But in prac­tice, so many every­day folks are los­ing mon­ey and assets to scam artists that it’s hard not to think more reg­u­la­tion is needed.

More on cryp­to dra­ma: Elon Musk Absolute­ly Hates Twitter’s Hexa­gon-Shaped NFT Pro­file Pics

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