To capitalize on a real partnership between Beeple Fashion and Louis Vuitton NFT, links were posted to a fake Louis Vuitton NFT raffle.
His Twitter account was hacked by Mike Winkelmann (also known as Beeple), a digital artist and popular nonfungible to token creator (NFT). This was part of a phishing scheme.
Harry Denley, security analyst at MetaMask, warned users that Beeple’s tweets, which contained a link to a raffle for a Louis Vuitton NFT Collaboration, were actually a phishing scam and would drain crypto from users’ wallets if they clicked.
These scammers likely wanted to profit from a recent collaboration between Louis Vuitton and Beeple. Beeple had earlier in May designed 30 NFTs to be embedded into the mobile game Louis The Game by luxury fashion brand Louis Vuitton.
The scammer continued posting phishing links from Beeple’s Twitter account, leading to fake Beeple collections. These were lured in by promising a free mint for unique non-financial TFTs.
Beeple’s Twitter account had the phishing links up for about five hours. An on-chain analysis of one scammer’s wallet shows that the first phishing URL they scored them 36 Ether ( Ethereum), which is approximately $73,000 at the time.
The scammers were able to get another link for $365,000 in ETH and NFTs from high value collections like the Mutant Ape Yacht Club and VeeFriends. This brings the total scammers’ loss to $438,000.
On-chain data shows that the fraudster sold the NFTs through OpenSea, and then put their stolen Ethereum into a cryptocurrency mixer to try to conceal the gains.
Beeple tweeted later that he had regained his control and reminded his followers that “anything that seems too good to be true is a F*CKING SCAM.”
Beeple is the creator of three of the ten most costly NFTs, including the one that sold for $69.3million. This was the highest price ever paid to a single owner. Hackers have made Beeple a target.
A Beeple’s Discord admin account was hacked by scammers. They also promoted a similar fake NFT drop, which led to users losing approximately 38 ETH.
Malwarebytes, a cybersecurity company, released a report earlier this month that highlighted an increase in phishing attempts by scammers trying to cash in on NFT hype. Scammers use fraudulent websites that appear to be legitimate platforms as their most popular tactic, according to Malwarebytes.
