Thieves received on average $300,000 per scam
London: Blockchain research firm Elliptic reported that Thieves stole over $100 million worth of non-fungible tokens from the start of 2022 to July, as the fast-emerging digital asset became a new front in crypto’s hacking problem.
NFTs are the newest blockchain-based assets that represent digital files such as images, videos, or text.
The NFT market surged in 2021 as crypto-rich speculators spent billions of dollars on them, hoping to profit as prices rose. However, since cryptocurrency faced a critical crisis and crashed in May and June this year, NFT prices and sales volumes have also plunged.
But the scams remain constant in the NFT market even after its decline. July witnessed the highest number of NFTs ever stolen on record according to a London-based Elliptic report.
They also said, “Security compromises via social media have surged, accounting for 23% of NFT thefts in 2022.”
Thieves received on average $300,000 per scam. The true scale of NFT thefts is likely to be even higher, given that not all crimes are publicly reported. Regulators around the world are highly concerned about the use of crypto assets in cybercrime.
The amount of money laundering known in NFT-based platforms is $8 million. But almost $329 million worth of funds in the NFT market came from services such as so-called cryptocurrency mixers, which are designed to hide the funds’ origin so the scams in them are still unknown.
One such mixer, Tornado Cash, was used for laundering just over half of the proceeds of NFT scams before it was sanctioned by the United States this month.
Citing a $540 million theft in April that U.S. officials have linked to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, Elliptic said, “There is a growing threat to NFT-based services from sanctioned entities and state-sponsored exploits.”
