Confessions of a Crypto Scammer: How one man stole thousands from artists

By Luke Whyte, Editorial Director

On the morning of June 11th, NFT artist Natasha Smith – whose name we changed due to fear of retaliation – came across an email from a Danish company seeking to purchase her work.

At first glance, it seemed legitimate. There was a company logo, examples of their previous work, and even a blurb about donating 10% of proceeds to a charity.

“I get a bunch of these emails so I wasn’t really thinking about it,” Smith said. “It didn’t trigger any, ‘Oh, this is sketchy’ feelings so I clicked it and it brought me to a Google Slides [presentation] that was attached to the email.”

Inside the presentation was a link: “Click here to view the terms”. This led to a .RAR file, which unzipped to what looked like a Microsoft Word file. Except, it wasn’t a Word file. It was a screensaver file (.SCR) that had been compromised by a hacker.

“I clicked on it and nothing happened,” Smith said. “Immediately, the alarms went off in my head: ‘Oh shit, this is a Trojan’. I Googled it and, sure enough.”

Her first thought was, ‘transfer everything out of Metamask’. What she didn’t realize, however, was that the virus had loaded a keylogger onto her computer. Now hackers could see everything she typed, including her Metamask password. A Supermarket Sweeps-style race ensued inside her wallet with hackers stealing one of her artworks and a few hundred dollars worth of ETH before she cleared the rest out.

3,000 miles away on the same day, artist Fvckrender opened a similar file following a similar request.

“For many years, I’ve been working with people sending me files and mockups for their projects,” he said. “And that’s exactly what happened.”

The hackers wiped out his Metamask completely, every token, and swiped  40,000 AXS (worth over $200,000 at the time and roughly a million today).

Three days prior in Indonesia, artist Suryanto Sur fell victim to a similar scam and, a month before him, artist Liquido Densidad was conned by a social engineering campaign attacking hundreds.