Turns out Bored Apes heists were only the beginning.
If you’ve been keeping an eye on the world of NFTs, you’ve probably been aware of some high-profile thefts in the last year or so. As it turns out, NFTs not having a physical component doesn’t necessarily make them theft-proof — it just changes the methods that would-be Danny Oceans have to utilize in order to make off with various pieces of digital art. And while some very visible examples of digital art theft have made the news — such as this Bored Ape heist — the full scale of NFT heists is much larger than that might indicate.
As a recent ARTnews article indicates, the full scale of NFT thefts from July 2021 to July 2022 is a nine-figure sum. That’s one of the biggest conclusions reached in a new report from Elliptic, a company that deals with crypto assets and security. According to said report, over $100 million worth of NFTs were stolen within that 12-month span.
The report went on to reveal that scammers made, on average, $300,000 for each case. And the pace of NFT heists doesn’t seem to have slowed — according to Elliptic’s research, 4,600 NFTs were stolen in July of 2022.
NFT heists might be less visually striking than their museum-bound counterparts, but that doesn’t mean that they’re any less profitable for those who engage in them — or any more illegal.
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