Mike “Beeple” Winkelmann, a non-fungible token (NFT) artist, has once again become the victim of phishing fraudsters. He is now advising users that the URL connection to his official Discord server has been “hacked,” exposing uninformed new members to a channel that drains their wallets.
The NFT artist urged fans not to enter the “fraudulent” Discord channel and verify because it will “drain your funds” in a post on October 3.
The Beeple: Everydays-2020 Collection on the NFT marketplace may have had its Discord link “hijacked,” according to a tweet by Twitter user maxnaut.eth made hours prior to Beeple’s discovery of the URL trick.
Beeple’s hacked Discord URL leads to a wallet drainer
The picture provided by maxnaut.eth indicates that the URL refers to a “CollabLand wallet drainer,” and it depicts a Collab.Land bot on Discord that instructs users to verify account ownership but actually drains their wallets.
Other members of the crypto Twitter community are saying that insufficient security procedures are actually to a fault, contrary to Beeple’s allegations that the URLs were hijacked and that Discord is to blame.
In response to the artist’s revelation, NFT analyst and blockchain investigator “OKHotshot” said that the URLs were not compromised but rather that “mismanagement of discord URLs allows this to happen, possibly exactly as it occurred to CryptoBatz.”
With some of the most expensive NFTs ever sold, like the First 5,000 Days, a collection of 5000 works of art that sold for $69.3 million, Beeple’s social media and messaging platforms seem to be a favorite target for fraudsters and hackers.
The list of notable clients on Beeple’s website includes Elon Musk’s spacecraft maker Space X, computing behemoth Apple, luxury label Louis Vuitton, and other well-known organizations and people.
His Twitter account was taken over in a phishing scam in May that generated $438,000 in cryptocurrency and NFTs by connecting to a lottery that was ostensibly associated with a Louis Vuitton and NFT cooperation.
The number of people who could have been harmed by the current fraudulent Discord connections was not disclosed by the artist. The issue has been fixed and seems to have regained access now.