Scammers are getting more creative by the week as NFT fever sweeps the world. In the early days of NFTs, you know, a few months ago, scammers tried things like bidding in USDC instead of ETH or provided links to fake versions of OpenSea…but now they’re getting even more crafty.
One of the most recent technique scammers are using to steal entire wallets full of NFTs happens in a way most people would never think of, which is also why it has been so successful. The way this scam works seems pretty harmless at first, you hop onto OpenSea and find a new NFT was sent to your wallet. You also notice there’s an offer on this NFT, maybe a way to make a few hundred bucks quickly you think?
As the saying goes, if it seems too good to be true, it usually is. Go on Twitter and you’ll hear story after story from people who suddenly find all their NFTs were transferred out of their account – it’s terrifying and incredibly sad to read about. There’s also a common thread, people interacted with a random airdropped NFT in some way.
So what should you do if a random NFT is airdropped to your account? The general advice is to leave it alone, tweets like the on below have been making the rounds a lot lately.
Overall the most consistent advice I’ve seen here is to not attempt to sell or transfer a random NFT that was airdropped to you. Most people recommend hiding these NFTs so you won’t see them in OpenSea, and while there has been a lot of debate about this it does seem like hiding is safe since this is making a change on OpenSea, not technically interacting with the NFT itself.
Luckily, it looks like OpenSea has been good at taking these scam NFTs out so if you do find something suspicious in your wallet, you can email OpenSea, here’s the details to do this:
At the end of the day there’s one piece of advice that everyone should take – get a Ledger or a Trezor and move your NFTs off of a hot wallet. A hardware wallet will require you to confirm actions on a physical device that you are in control of and can help prevent that vast majority of these scams.
I hope this article helps at least one person avoid this scam, if it does, it was well worth the time to write it. Be safe out there everyone!
