A Fraudster Profited Out of a Bug in the NFT Marketplace

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A Bug in the NFT Marketplace Encouraged a Fraudster to Capture $750,000

Written by Aaron S.,

Editor-In-Chief

Last Updated: January 31, 2022

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Malicious activity can be spotted from time to time on various exchanges.

Keeping that in mind, OpenSea is one of the largest NFT exchanges that fell victim just recently.

NFT are enormously popular nowadays, and people tend to be curious about what these art-based digital assets are all about, potentially attracting an increasing number of scams.

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On January 24th the cyber security intelligence company Peckshield announced that it detected a "front-end attack" on the OpenSea marketplace and suffered an $800K loss. Until now, people believed that it was a result of a hack. But we’ve got a recent update that it supposedly was a bug.

The recent bug in the NFT marketplace, allowed users to buy the top NFT’s at their desired price.

One Twitter post explained more details about the incident, saying that users found a way to prevent the significant OpenSea cancel fee and the decrease of the NFT’s floor price. Here is how they might have done it: users didn't cancel their sales, and instead transferred their possessions to a different wallet, which automatically removes the listing from OpenSea.

Unfortunately, the bug keeps the listing active using OpenSea API (An application programming interface (API) is a link between two computers or applications).

You would notice that the alleged bug is widespread with Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) NFT collectibles. Additionally, the alleged fraudster didn’t waste any time and bought the most popular collectibles at their old listing price, further selling them for the current market price, making approximately $750,000.

A user named "jpegdegenlove" is already the main suspect that profited 332 Ether (ETH). However, there are no guarantees that he is, in fact, the guilty one.

For now, users can check their listings on another NFT marketplace that uses OpenSea’s API. Besides, the platform still didn’t acknowledge the incident and issues that came with it.