NFT collector with the Twitter handle @franklinisbored has lost 100 Ether, worth approximately $150k, in a self-joke sale. On Wednesday, the person who owns 57 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs minted the ENS domain “stop-doing-fake-bids-its-honestly-lame-my-guy.eth” using an alternate wallet.
Franklin tried to trigger the EnsBidsBot account to tweet about a 100 ETH bid on an ENS domain. His ulterior motive, as deciphered from the below tweet, was to perhaps mock such bot Twitter accounts.
Franklin had self-bid on his own registered Ethereum Name Service domain. He also got another bid of 1.9 ETH [approximately $3k]. He was quick to accept the new bid. However, he forgot to withdraw his own 100 ETH bid.
Tweeting about the “bag fumble of the century,” Franklin noted,
“Oh no, I lost 100 ETH. I was celebrating my joke of a domain sale, sharing the spoils, but in a dream of greed, forgot to cancel my own bid of 100 ETH to buy it back. This will be the joke and bag fumble of the century. I deserve all of the jokes and criticism.”
He added that he hadn’t gotten “botted” and had enough time to retract his offer. Franklin sent another NFT – “An embarrasing mistake” to the opposite party to retrieve funds. The same is essentially a snapshot of text elaborating on the incident and what the creation of this new NFT intends to achieve.
Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Yuga Labs issues warning
The rise in the number of scams is the by-product of the soaring popularity of NFTs. Several types of research have shown that a somewhat less percentage of people purchase tokens to collect and store them long-term. Most mint/buy and sell tokens to make quick bucks. Scammers with the same intention haven’t held themselves back either, and they usually do not hesitate to con new participants to book profits.
Read More: Why are investors pouring billions of dollars into the NFT industry?
As in Franklin’s case, it is a common phenomenon for people to mint and then self their own NFTs to themselves. They usually do so at a much higher cost and then re-listing them. Fresh bids mount on the table are way higher than the acquisition cost, yet buyers get tricked into believing that they’re buying NFTs at a discount. Ultimately, the OG owner ends up being in a profitable position.
Perpetrators also take undue advantage of social media platforms and target communities. Alongside hacks, they end up misleading members to trick them. A couple of days back, Bored Ape Yacht Club’s creator Yuga Labs, took Twitter to inform the members that a “persistent threat group” could launch a coordinated attack targeting a bunch of communities using “compromised” social media handles.
So, with scammers everywhere, it is best advised always to remain vigilant and step aside whenever red flags are spotted.