Hackers Swipe Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs After Crashing Discord and Instagram Accounts

Hackers took over Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Instagram account and Discord server Monday (April 25), sending an unofficial link to followers to “mint” non-fungible tokens (NFTs), but project leaders moved quickly to ensure that didn’t happen, according to a CoinDesk report.

“There is no mint going on today,” the NFT project wrote on Twitter. “It looks like BAYC Instagram was hacked. Do not mint anything, click links or link your wallet to anything.”

There is no mint going on today. It looks like BAYC Instagram was hacked. Do not mint anything, click links, or link your wallet to anything.

— Bored Ape Yacht Club (@BoredApeYC) April 25, 2022

The fraudulent social media link said users could mint “land” in the upcoming OthersideMeta, which is due to launch later this week and those who clicked the link had their wallets compromised, the report says, transferring Bored Apes and Mutant Apes transferred to new wallets by the hackers.

The hackers stole about 24 Bored Apes and 30 Mutant Apes totaling $13.7 million in value, according to recent OpenSea transfers, with CoinDesk noting some of those transfers may represent holders transferring their non-fungible tokens for security purposes. Yuga Labs says the attack is far smaller.

“The hacker posted a fraudulent link to a copycat of the Bored Ape Yacht Club website, where a safeTransferFrom attack asked users to connect their MetaMask to the scammer’s wallet in order to participate in a fake Airdrop,” a spokesperson told CoinDesk by email.

“At 9:53am ET, we alerted our community, removed all links to Instagram from our platforms and attempted to recover the hacked Instagram account,” the spokesperson said.

Yuga Labs and Instagram are still investigating how the account was compromised, the spokesperson said, adding that 4 Bored Apes, 6 Mutant Apes and 3 BAKC and other NFTs estimated at a total value of about $3 million were stolen.

Related: Hackers Attempt to Trick Bored Ape Fans Into Minting Fake NFTs

Earlier this month, hackers “briefly compromised” Bored Ape Yacht Club’s NFT collection through chat servers on messaging platform Discord and attempted to trick users into minting fake tokens.