"It's recently come to our attention that spammers are auto DMing people as soon as they join the server," chief visionary officer Zen0x.eth wrote in the Mr Bean NFT Discord announcements channel. "Please do not interact with anyone posing as a Fomo Lab team member or 'official bot' - we are not giving away any presales or 'Free NFTs'."
The Mr Bean NFT line - approved by Rowan Atkinson himself - is being run by Fomo Lab. To bring their community together, they created a Discord and already, it's running into scam problems as members are being picked out by bots with fishing links aiming to steal money and NFTs.
Almost immediately after the server's launch, someone lost out in a scam: "They told me I need to pay maintenance fees to release my profit and, as I invested less than they requested for maintenance fees, I have been unable to pay these fees," Karuma wrote. "I have now realised it's probably a scam and would appreciate some guidance on how I can recover any funds. I just wish I had bought more crypto instead of trusting idiots."
Right after joining, I was met with DM after DM about NFTs and crypto. One such message linked me to a new Discord called Treasury, merging classical art with NFTs. Another was promising a special price of 0.2 ETH for a limited Mr Bean mint, while funnily enough also warned me not to trust other links: "All others are fake!"
Plenty have voiced frustration at how common scam bots are for the server, with DMs like these becoming increasingly common for members. "Geez, is this permanent announcement in the official channel real?" Metaborandriel asked. "I'm getting tired of those scam posts. How do I even verify when this happens all the time?"
Zen0x.eth addressed the growing contempt, "It's so unfortunate that this has happened to our community, we're annoyed and angry at the bad actors that have breached our Discord and managed to do this."
Some, such as Jupa77, replied to say that they clicked links and loft NFTs, while others commented that they came to share their artwork and got scammed: "Nice weekend" as DOPEVMEN puts it.