More than 80% of NFTs created for free on OpenSea, the biggest cryptoart marketplace, are fraud or spam, the company said in January. Estimates vary, but they’re generally high. “I’d say probably 70% of NFT people are out to scam,” says Franck Bossi, a French YouTuber who has been running a channel called NFT WatchDog for over a year. Rug pulls are common, making up nearly 40% of crypto scams and costing users about $2.8bn last year, up from just 1% the previous year, according to analytics house Chainalysis. The world of digital collectibles is riddled with a dazzling, seemingly never-ending number of big money scams. The industry’s standard bearer, a cartoon picture of an ape, costs around $300k.īut for every Bored Ape jpeg there are many more hastily drawn doodles by criminals to entice people into giving away their money.īored Apes are the big moneymakers in NFT-land.
It’s a frothy market for NFTs, with some worth hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars. “I was part of history: not everyone has footage of a real-time scamming.” Monkey trouble And yet, as is the case with a surprising number of NFT scam victims, the experience hasn’t put Papadopoulos off - already the next day he was able to see the positive side.
It was another in a long line of NFT “rug pulls”, a term for when developers take the money and run. Soon after, the Discord page also disappeared. In a panic, Papadopoulos checked Twitter to find the project’s page had vanished. He thought it was because so many people were minting at the same time - but really it was a scam to keep people emptying their crypto wallets. The rocket emoji (what else?) count was climbing well over 700 in the seconds before the NFT, called Baller Ape Club, launched - the so-called public minting, or first-come, first-served sale.īut every time Papadopoulos clicked “mint”, he got this message: “Your transaction failed.” I’d say probably 70% of NFT people are out to scam
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