NFT scams: don’t get fooled
NFTs are undoubtfully the best investment one could make in 2021, and leading collections’ prices continue to rise even now, with weekly NFT sales increasing 81%.
As other lucrative areas though, NFTs naturally attract all sorts of scammers.
Solana has recently registered on of the biggest NFT scams pulled off by the “Big Daddy Ape Club” project founders. The would-be NFT mint turned out to be a “rug pull” – an exit scam where developers exploit smart contract and leave with the collected funds, which in this case amounted to around $1.3M at the time.
This scam was particularly harsh, not only because the victims never received their NFTs (sometimes scammers still send them before exit), but also because the project was verified by the Civic Pass – a company that checks founders’ identity and their control over the Twitter handle and the project website’s domain. The company is now working with the law enforcement to find the scammers.
On the secondary market some of the most popular scams include:
? luring sellers into using false links bearing a resemblance with decentralized NFT marketplaces
? phishing ads asking to enter seed phrase
?? plagiarized NFTs (attention to the spelling: there’s a huge difference between a Bored Ape and a Boredd Ape, and the provenance)
So please be careful with your NFT.
⚠️ for minting: make sure to gather as much data as you can on the founders and the community
⚠️ for trading: double-check the marketplace or the swap link, the currency of a bid, the collection name and, in its absence, smart contract of the issuer
