Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), one of the oldest and most successful NFTs in existence, has been hacked twice in the same month. The first came earlier in April after the NFT’s Discord channel became compromised, allowing scammers to post fake NFT mint links that resulted in Bored Ape users being drained of their crypto assets. And the second came earlier today in a very similar hack of the group’s Instagram account.A full explanation was provided by the Bored Ape Yacht Club Twitter account just moments ago. "This morning, the official BAYC Instagram account was hacked," the group posted. "The hacker posted a fraudulent link to a copycat of the BAYC website with a fake Airdrop, where users were prompted to sign a ‘safeTransferFrom’ transaction. This transferred their assets to the scammer's wallet."According to NFT and crypto news site Watcher.Guru, Bored Ape users have had as much as $13.7 million in assets stolen as a result of the hack. The extent of the damage is still being tabulated, the site says 24 Bored apes and 30 Mutant Apes have been stolen so far, alongside other cryptocurrencies.
Bored Ape co-founder Garga.eth promised to contact all users affected by the hack as well as release a full post-mortem once the group has been able to investigate with Instagram. The co-founder said that two-factor authentication was enabled, and all proper security protocols were observed, implying that whatever person or group performed the hack must have gone to elaborate lengths to bypass the 2FA security.
Bored Ape Yacht Club started minting NFTs a year ago and has since gained total sales of over $1 billion USD. Multiple celebrities have helped to popularize Bored Ape NFTs, including Justin Bieber, Jimmy Fallon, Snoop Dogg, and Madonna. Bored Ape uses Ethereum blockchain technology to store its NFTs.