It was recently reported that a young, 17-year-old NFT hacker was involved in a phishing scam revolving around the CreatureToadz project. Now, the money (86 ETH / $342,526) involved has since been returned.
Creaturetoadz fell victim to a phishing scam by a hacker. The money was later returned. Credit: Creaturetoadz
About the Original Hack by the ‘Young NFT Hacker’
We’ve seen many scams and rug pulls in the NFT space as of recent, and it’s been potentially risky at times for new collectors to be involved in the space. This time the hack came from a totally decent project but came from someone outside the team involved.
The 17-year-old hacker used a phishing webhook to create an operational error in the CreatureToadz NFT Discord. The hacker, who’s unnamed set themself as admin to complete the hack. And in addition to this, one of the main moderators of the group was tricked by the young NFT hacker and lost access to the server.
People who minted their NFTs paid to an unknown account that had total control over the discord server. For about 45 minutes, the team could not do anything. But by then, the ones who clicked on the phishing link had already lost nearly $350,000.
The project tweeted about their hurt after the hack had taken place, you can see the Tweet here.
About the Money being Returned
In many cases, after a hack like this happens there is no positive end result. But in this case, the team at CreatureToadz got the money back from the NFT hacker after apologising for the breach. Even before the money was returned, the team had even promised to give money back to those who were scammed.
8 hours after the original hack and incident, the stolen funds were returned to the project. It was later discovered that the hacker was in fact 17. He spent time on a Twitter Space with a popular name in NFTs, Andrew Wang. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen money from a scam returned.
Subsequently, all the money has been returned, and since their re-launch, they sold out and now the floor price 0n Opensea is at 0.4 ETH after minting at 0.1 ETH.
