The newly launched NFT project was subject to a phishing scam through its Discord channel.
With NFTs rising in value over the past couple of months, there have been several successful attempts by scammers to rob people of their digital assets.
Rare Bears is a recent NFT project which had 7,777 limited edition collectibles available to mint from March 12th. The collection was created by digital artist Enox.
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The phishing scam was initially announced on March 17th by the Rare Bears team, warning users not to click on any links that are sent from their Discord channel. However, several owners of the Rare Bears NFTs had already succumbed to the scam.
According to the real-time blockchain security firm PeckShield, the scammer managed to lure out approximately 179 NFTs from the wallets of Rare Bears owners. The stolen NFTs mostly included Rare Bear collectibles, but other users lost their CloneX, Azuki digital assets, and Sandbox’s virtual LAND plots.
The following day, Rare Bears posted an audit regarding the phishing scam and concluded that the Head of the NFT Project, presumably Vincent Ing, had his Discord account stolen. Unfortunately, he was also the owner of the Discord channel.
While the breach was resolved by onboarding a security expert Pandez, no word of user reimbursement was mentioned by the project. With that being said, phishing scams usually fall under the responsibility of the owners themselves so any chances of reimbursement are probably out the door.
This isn’t the first time NFT owners were targeted by phishing links. Back in February, OpenSea users were targeted by malicious links, leading to $1.7M worth of NFTs, including collectibles from the Bored Ape Yacht Club, falling into the hands of scammers.
