Animoca Brands and subsidiary Blowfish Studios have promised users that they will repay 265 Ether (ETH) or $1.1 million stolen in a fraudulent nonfungible token (NFT) sale on Discord.
It has been reported that the fraudulent minting event occurred at approximately 3 am Australian Eastern Daylight Time last Friday on the Phantom Galaxies Discord server.
However, it saw 1,571 fake minting transactions over the course of about three hours. Phantom Galaxies is an upcoming Australian game being developed by Blowfish Studios. The Phantom Galaxies Discord server has 94,000 members.
The report said that in an increasingly common occurrence on Discord, hackers gained control of the official Phantom Galaxies server by using a malware bot that compromised the Admin account’s two-factor authentication. Once in control of the Discord server, the hackers banned all staff, advisor, and community moderator accounts.
Likewise, the hackers then began posting announcements, claiming that the game was launching an immediate surprise “stealth” NFT minting event. Users were directed to a fraudulent “Phantom Galaxies NFT minting platform” that charged users a 0.1-ETH “minting fee.”
Yat Siu, the chairman of Animoca Brands, warned followers about the fraudulent NFT drop in a tweet at around 4 am AEDT.
Similarly, at 5:22 am, he posted another tweet by saying that affected customers will be “appropriately compensated.” This has since been confirmed in a Wednesday release from Animoca stating that details regarding compensation will be announced shortly.
Thus, in April, Talos Intelligence similarly found that hackers were increasingly using platforms such as Discord to take advantage of users who were at home due to global COVID-19 restrictions.
Source: Cointelegraph