This is one of the dirtiest tricks that may happen to you on Opensea scams and it may cost you months or even years of hard work and lose your valuable NFTs and funds😭.
Chainwitcher’s mission is to spread awareness in the NFT space, so it won’t happen to you!
There are some terms you should understand before we can start educating you about this tricky scam, let’s go!
NFT Scam Key Term: Wallet Address
When you create a wallet it will generate a unique 26-35 alphanumeric characters, this will be used for sending, receiving funds & NFTs, you can pay for services with your crypto wallet in 2 simple steps:
- Setup your wallet: for example, Metamask you can install it on your web browser as an extension.
- If you want to buy anything from a compatible website when you click the “Buy” button website will ask you to connect your wallet. After you connect you can pay, it’s just that simple.
- Also, you can use your wallet to create an account to log in without using an email address, it will make life easier in the web3 world.
Explanation of NFT Airdrops
Yes, you guessed it right. It’s like sitting in your house and a package falls out of the sky into your room. They call it an airdrop. The same thing happens in the NFT world. Anyone can airdrop you a free NFT by just knowing your wallet address.
Airdrops started when some NFT groups want to provide more value for their NFT holders. They send them a free NFT. Just like bored ape owners, they receive an airdrop of free bored ape dogs. These dogs can sell for thousands of dollars. So in a summary, anyone can send you an airdrop if they have your wallet address. Also, everything is public in the blockchain world! We will explain this part later. That’s all you have to know for now!
Opensea NFT SCAM
NFT scams are really easy to happen. As we mentioned earlier that in a decentralized blockchain everything is public, and everyone can see any transaction you make.
Check the screenshot below, you can check all recent transactions and old history, visit Etherscan.io to check by yourself.
Imagine you just purchased an expensive NFT From OpenSea like Bored Ape. The transaction will show up in Etherscan, and now you are a target to be scammed!
Here’s How They Can Scam You: Based On a Real-life Event
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- Imagine now you’re sitting on your computer chilling and you received an airdrop that we talked about earlier. This airdrop is an NFT for free and now you own that NFT. This should smell fishy. It’s the first red flag of an NFT Scam. Ask yourself why would anyone send u an NFT for free out of nowhere!
3/- All 500 items were airdropped to 500 BAYC @BoredApeYC owners to trick them and steal their BAYC. pic.twitter.com/J4vceIoQcF
— Swanky Orc (@swankyorc_) September 25, 2022
2. You are happy that you received an NFT for free with a high floor price, this means you can sell it for a good amount of money.
2/ i started getting an email of bids between 0.2-0.5eth on nfts i dont remember interacting with. I checked the collection and found it has 500 items.
You see a website highlighted “free mint” and written in bio.
Total volume is 0 pic.twitter.com/89ZLqNr1zY— Swanky Orc (@swankyorc_) September 25, 2022
3. After a while, you receive a bid on open-sea with a price higher than the floor price now that’s a good deal, your greed takes control and you “Click” “Accept Offer Bid”.
4. The offer that you accepted doesn’t work!! You think it’s a technical issue from opensea. But in fact, it’s a trick the offer that you received is from the scammers. The same scammers who sent you the Free NFT. They can cancel the offer and still show up without stating it’s canceled from your side. That’s a loophole in opensea. They loophole needed to execute an NFT scam!
5. Now after the offer didn’t work, now you think there’s a lot of demand for that nft collection. You can’t sleep at night and your greed starts controlling you more and more.
6. So you enter their website to see if they have any collection that you can mint. The website will ask you for permission to connect your wallet. You will connect it without doing your research about the collection, who is the team, and enter their discord. See the engagement although everything can be faked if you use logic you can catch scammy projects easily.
7. After authorizing your wallet to their website, you will notice all your NFT collection and funds are transferred to another account. Welcome! You’ve got scammed.
5/ when you try to view it, it seems encrypted, but with some tools online it is a little bit readible. The attacker added an antidebugger to make it harder for people to analyze what’s going on.
Other variations of websites did not have the anti debugging code. pic.twitter.com/f29cv9IgAf— Swanky Orc (@swankyorc_) September 25, 2022
The Important Rule about NFT Scams
In a nutshell, never trust any free airdrops & never connect your wallet to unknown untrusted websites. Always do your research before acting. NFT scams are really scary and can affect you greatly! The good news is that open-sea is reacting to that issue and removing scammy projects from their marketplace. Carry on to our simple 4-step-guide on how to buy and sell NFTs from Opensea!
https://twitter.com/opensea/status/1575315224042799104?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw