The attacker posted a fraudulent message from the project’s official channel.
Buyers hoping to get a limited-edition NFT from Fractal, a new marketplace for game item NFTs, were given an unpleasant and costly surprise on Tuesday morning when it was revealed that a link sent through the project’s official Discord channel was a scam set up to steal crypto.
Users who followed the link and connected their crypto wallets, expecting to receive an NFT, instead found that their holdings of Solana (SOL) cryptocurrency were emptied and transferred to the scammer’s account. An analysis posted on Medium by Tim Cotten, founder of another NFT gaming project, estimated the value of SOL stolen to be around $150,000.
Fractal is a startup project from Twitch co-founder Justin Kan specializing in the buying and selling of NFTs representing in-game assets. It was announced earlier in December and quickly amassed a following of more than 100,000 users through Discord — making it a target for the kind of scammers that have plagued NFT projects since the beginning.