Steven Galanis, CEO of celebrity voicemail service Cameo, has been hacked. Galanis reported his Apple ID had been backed on Saturday, resulting in a number of valuable blockchain-based assets being stolen.Among them was Bored Ape number 9012, which Variety reports was purchased by Galanis in January for around $320,000. The thief then sold Ape 9012 for 77 Ethereum, which works out to roughly $130,000. That’s less than half of what Galanis paid for it, which we can chalk up to the crypto crash.In addition to the Bored Ape NFT, Galanis also lost over 9,000 in $APE, Bored Ape’s cryptocurrency, with a total value of $69,000 as of the time of this writing. Several NFTs were also stolen, including three Otherside metaverse plots, one Phanta Bear, and two 11 Captain’s Club tokens.
Galanis asked NFT marketplace OpenSea to lock his account and freeze the stolen NFTs from further trading, which the platform did on Monday. Because all transactions are recorded on the blockchain, tracing the thief is relatively simple. However, linking the hacker to a real life person is considerably more difficult.
This isn't the first time a celebrity has been forcefully parted from their Bored Ape. Robot Chicken's Seth Green had his Bored ape stolen at the end of May in a phishing scam. He had to shell out $300,000 to get it back because without it Green wouldn't have the star for his upcoming sitcom based in a world where NFTs are actually alive.
This also isn't the first time Bored Apes have been the center of crypto controversy. The Bored Ape Discord server was hit with a phishing scam earlier this year when over $6 million apes were stolen.