Rug Pull Finder (RPF), a nonfungible token (NFT) watchdog, has focused on identifying Web3-based fraud, has fallen victim to a smart contract exploit of its own.
It has been reported that two people exploited a technical flaw in the project during the free mint stage — pilfering 450 NFTs out of a possible 1,221, which were intended to be limited to one per wallet. According to RPF, their smart contract had a flaw that allowed the code to be exploited, allowing the bandits to allocate more than the allowed number of NFTs to themselves.
However, the RPF team made moves to rectify the situation soon after the exploit, offering one of the people involved a deal to pay them a bounty of 2.5 Ether (ETH), worth $3,944.68, as of September 5, to recover 330 of the NFTs, which was accepted. The crypto investigators noted that the exploiters “did negotiate in good faith and allow us to come to a reasonable solution with them.”
The report said that the free mint, titled Bad Guys, featured artworks of NFT “scammers accidentally let loose on the blockchain.” The collection serves as a whitelist or presale for members before the upcoming 10,000 NFT collection this fall. Holding a Bad Guy NFT provides exclusive access to the mint, the RPF main drop, and other upcoming projects.
Likewise, the watchdog group admitted that the exploit occurred as they didn’t heed warnings from an unknown source about the flaw, which was sent 30 minutes before the mint went LIVE.
RPF stated:
“After reviewing it with three different dev teams, we did not believe the credibility of the information sent to us... We were clearly wrong, and we are truly, truly sorry.”
The NFT investigator pointed to digital blockchain creative agency Doxxed Media as having handled all the art and contract work and admitted that it “did not have our team audit it, or an independent 3rd party.”
The irony of the exploit has not been missed by the crypto community, with some praising the NFT investigator for admitting to its fault, while others have questioned how a company specializing in detecting smart contract vulnerabilities didn’t conduct the proper checks on its own project.
Thus, through consultation with their online community, RPF has decided to distribute the recovered NFTs across a variety of spaces, including in the Bad Guys Vault, a raffle on Twitter, and two further raffles for projects that are friends of Rug Pull Finder and the Rug Pull Finder public sale wallet collection list.
Source: Cointelegraph