Bored Ape Yacht Club Instagram Hacked, $3 Million Of NFTs Stolen

In yet another example of scammers stealing Bored Ape owners out of their NFTs, the Bored Ape Yacht Club Instagram account was hacked Monday morning, and the hackers purportedly made off with nearly $3 million of crypto art.

"This morning, the official BAYC Instagram account was hacked," tweeted the official BAYC account. "The hacker posted a fraudulent link to a copycat of the BAYC website with a fake Airdrop, where users were prompted to sign a ‘safeTransferFrom’ transaction. This transferred their assets to the scammer's wallet."

Evidently, the marks clicked the phishing link believing they would be able to mint new features for their apes. Instead, they gave the malevolent party access to their Ethereum wallet, where they stole the goods.

According to amateur crypto sleuth @zachxbt, the hackers got away with 91 NFTs — a combined total value of roughly $3 million USD. He later told Artnet News that the hacker sold the stolen NFTs "for a below-value 761.8 ETH ($2.25 million) and transferred the money to accounts with Kucoin and Binance."

The official Bored Ape Yacht Club Twitter account told its followers that the hackers were able to get into the Instagram account despite the account having two-factor authentication. They also pleaded with their followers to understand that the Bored Ape team would never contact them first and they would never ask for their "seed phrase."

If you were affected by the hack or have information that might be helpful, reach out to ighack@yugalabs.io. You need to contact us first – anybody contacting you first is not us. We will NOT reach out to anyone over email first, and we will NEVER ask for your seed phrase.

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

With yet another multi-million-dollar NFT theft taking place, NFT doubters crowed in schadenfreude over the misfortune of those affected by the scam.

pic.twitter.com/SnpjajfGEm

— cozy (@cozymaximalist) April 25, 2022

Incredible reply. Outstanding. A modern art masterpiece. pic.twitter.com/GujVvjXYzK

— Disappointed Optimist (@disappoptimism) April 25, 2022

I just don't understand how all the NFT/web3 people are constantly like "you own your content and it's distributed and secure" when like every single day there's a new story of massive amounts of content being stolen irrecoverably and in a lot of the cases it's not even a crime.

— Josh Collinsworth (@jjcollinsworth) April 26, 2022

[tune California Dreamin']

🎵 All my apes are gone / Allllll my aaaapes are gone
They been hacked awaayyy 🎵 https://t.co/9JYxLLiXiS

— Bill Corbett (@BillCorbett) April 25, 2022

It seems that there's no end in sight to massive NFT-based heists, at least until Bored Ape owners stop falling for relatively obvious phishing scams.