Losing NFTs and the Trust Of The Community

Popular NFT thought leader NFT God loses all claims to have lost a “life-changing amount” of NFTs. On January 14th, the crypto influencer announced via Twitter that his entire digital livelihood was “hacked and used to hurt others”. NFT God is the latest victim of crypto scammers. The frauds also sent out malicious emails to around 16,000 of his closest followers. Learn more about the incident below.

NFT God Hack: How Did It Happen?

NFT God claims that his assets were hacked due to a sponsored advertisement link. This specific link contains malware that then allowed hackers access into NFT God’s system. The influencer lost access to Twitter, Substack, Gmail, Discord, and wallet accounts,s due to the hack. This further led to the anonymous crypto builder losing almost all his digital assets and collateral damage to his closest followers.

NFT God believes that the reason for the hack was because their ledger was set as a hot wallet instead of a cold wallet on a new PC. To be specific, they entered the seed phrase in a way that “no longer made it a cold wallet.” This in turn grants access to hackers to users’ NFTs and crypto. The malicious software got into the system due to NFT God clicking on a fake download link. NFT God was trying to download the popular video streaming software OBS, and clicked on one of the sponsored ad links, instead of the official link.

The influencer was to live-stream a video game for the first time, via the (installed) OBS software. After a couple of hours of the installation, Twitter user Klopp.eth notified NFT God of the strange activity.

Malicious Emails

The NFT influencer only found out about the hack later on. More specifically, a series of phishing tweets were sent out via two accounts under NFT God’s control. Furthermore, the scammers sent two malicious emails to 16,000 of NFT Gods Substack subscribers. This further caused damage to over a year of work and community trust.

The data suggests that 19 ETH (~$30,000) and a Mutant Ape NFT are among several other digital assets that were stolen from the wallet. The hacker unloaded the crypto/NFTs onto multiple wallets before swapping them on FixedFloat for other cryptocurrencies.

Malware On Google Ads

NFT God like many others in the crypto community is a victim of malware-targeting software in Google Ads. Cybersecurity firm Cyble mentions “Rhadamanthys Stealer” which is the malicious software spreading through Google ads. The software runs a program with a ‘trojan horse’, after which the mnemonic of the encrypted asset is connected to the Internet on the computer. This then makes it easy for the hackers to steal data from the system.

After the phishing attack, they have expressed regret in their decision to not immediately buy a cold wallet, but also states that buying a cold wallet may have not made much of a difference. They state that people must be careful with every single thing they do on the internet.