Phishing attack steals $438,000 in crypto and NFTs from hacked Beeple account

Beeple’s Twitter account hack and phishing attack netted $438,000.

The account of digital artist and popular NFT creator Mike Winkelman, better known as Beeple, was hacked this Sunday in a phishing scam. Harry Denley, a security analyst at MetaMask, warned users that Beeple’s tweets at the time included a link to a Louis Vuitton NFT collection giveaway, which was actually just a scam that siphoned off the cryptocurrency wallets of users who clicked.

Beeple Twitter account hacked

The organizers of this scam counted on the fact that quite a real collaboration between Beeple and Louis Vuitton had recently taken place. A few days ago, Beeple created 30 NFTs for the game of the famous luxury brand Louis The Game. They were offered as rewards to players.

The instigator of this scam kept posting links from Beeple’s Twitter account, which resulted in fake Beeple collections promising users certain rewards. These links were visible for about five hours, and analysis of one of the scammers’ wallets shows that the first broken link recovered 36 ether (ETH), or about $73,000 at the time. The second link netted them around $365,000 worth of ETH and lots of NFTs from major collections like Mutant Ape Yacht Club, VeeFriends, and Otherdeeds. In total, about 438,000 digital assets were stolen. The data shows that scammers are selling NFTs on OpenSea and stolen ETH on a crypto mixer in an attempt to launder their proceeds.

and a phishing attack that netted $438,000.

Beeple finally regained control of his account and tweeted to his followers that “anything too good to be true IS A FUCKING SCAM”. Beeple created three of the 10 most expensive NFTs sold to date, one of which reached $69.3 million, the most expensive ever sold to a single user. That’s why he became the target of this hack.

In November 2021, the admin account on Discord Beeple was hacked, the scammers promoted fake NFT drops again, resulting in users losing about 38 ETH. A few weeks ago, cybersecurity firm Malwarebytes published a report pointing to a spike in phishing attempts as scammers look to take advantage of the popularity of NFTs. There are more and more scam sites appearing trying to impersonate legitimate platforms and this is the most common tactic among scammers.