Ozzy Osbourne’s ‘CryptoBatz’ NFT project was targeted by scammers with buyers having lost £10,000s, in a sign of some of the perils of the digital art market.
Just days after the Prince of Darkness minted his 9,666 ‘crypto bats’ – a reference to his infamous eating of a bat onstage in 1982 – the project was targeted by scammers.
The scammers were able to use a redundant link to continue to defraud people who thought they were buying the digital tokens of ownership, The Verge reported, after the ‘CryptoBatz’ project changed its URL without deleting its previous one.
Scammers were then able to take advantage of the change, by continuing to use and promote the old link which then asked users to connect their cryptocurrency. It is estimated that the phishing scam has led to the loss in the region of $10,000s.
Eventually aware of the error, the official ‘CryptoBatz’ Twitter account put out a message warning potential buyers of the ‘multiple FAKE discord servers pretending to be CryptoBatz, some are very sophisticated – one has even hijacked an old vanity link we were using’.
Ozzy Osbourne subtly channelling his inner Lucifer in 1981.
When asked for comment, a co-founder of Sutter Systems, developers for the NFT project, said that ‘although we feel very sorry for the people that have fallen prey to these scams, we cannot take responsibility for the actions of scammers exploiting Discord — a platform that we have absolutely no control over.
‘In our opinion this situation and hundreds of others that have taken place across other projects in the NFT space,’ he told The Verge, ‘could have easily been prevented if Discord just had a better response/support/fraud team in place to help big projects like ours.’
In response, Peter Day, senior manager for corporate communications at Discord, commented: ‘Our Trust & Safety team is in touch with the server owners and are investigating the incident. Our team takes action when we become aware of attacks like this one, including banning users and shutting down servers.’
Many users commented on the matter, warning others to avoid the dud link. John Legere, the CEO of T-Mobile US, meanwhile, Tweeted: ‘A simple oversight was all it took for scammers to jump on Ozzy Osbourne’s NFT collection. Protect your digital security!’
⚠️ There are multiple FAKE discord servers pretending to be CryptoBatz, some are very sophisticated – one has even hijacked an old vanity link we were using.
We’re trying to speak to @discord to close down these fake servers.
Please be vigilant – the official link is in our bio.— CryptoBatz (@CryptoBatzNFT) January 21, 2022
Regardless of who’s responsibility the scam was, the incident nonetheless highlights some of the risks within the dealing of digital art, as it continues to grow apace. OpenSea, for instance, one of the most popular NFT trading platforms was valued at more than an eye-watering $13 billion (£9.8bn).
This recent scamming episode was not the first in which the realm of digital art has struggled with the issue of policing its user’s property. In December, Todd Kramer, of New York’s Ross+Kramer Gallery, woke up to find a phishing scam had taken 15 NFTs, including four Bored Apes, from his Ethereum wallet with a combined valuation of $2.2million.
OpenSea eventually, and controversially, decided to ‘freeze’ some of the NFTs that had been stolen – a move that was criticised by NFT purists, who claimed such a move went against a market that prides itself on liberty and the lack of governance.
Quite how such issues will continue to be solved going forwards remains to be seen. For now, with Ozzy Osbourne’s NFT project specifically, users have been asked to use this link – https://discord.com/invite/cryptobatz – and not any previous ones.
