Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), due to their popularity and celebrity endorsement, have emerged as a trendy virtual asset category to buy and hold in recent times. However, this digital asset sector is under constant threat from hackers who intend to steal digital collectibles from the expensive, exclusive NFT chain. Market research firm Elliptic has said in a recent report that NFTs worth $100 million (about Rs 800 crore) have been stolen between July 2021 and July 2022 alone. The report has raised an alert for the NFT community to keep its walls high against hackers and scammers.
The perpetrators of these NFT thefts can receive huge sums of up to $300,000 (approximately Rs 2,40 crore) in each incident.
Elliptic informed its 11.4K followers on Twitter about its findings.
:rotating_light: Between July 2021 and July 2022 over $100 million worth of NFTs were publicly reported as stolen through scams, bringing criminals an average of $300,000 per scam.
go towards https://t.co/u6iPLjXgpR To read our NFT and Financial Crime Reports.#nft #crypto #executive— Elliptical (@elliptic) 24 August 2022
Per its findings, Elliptic also noted that these stolen NFTs are being used as tools to launder stolen crypto funds.
Elliptic said in a statement, “Since 2017 over $8 million (approximately Rs 63 crore) of illicit money has been laundered through NFT-based platforms – representing 0.02 percent of trading activity originating from known sources. does.” official blog post,
Crypto mixers such as Tornado Cash have also been used to launder money collected by resale of stolen NFTs.
According to the report, Tornado Cash was used to launder $137.6 million (about Rs 1,099 crore) of crypto-assets processed by NFT Marketplace and emerged as a hacker-favorite privacy mixer.
Exactly this week, the creators of the Sudorair NFT marketplace ceased operations just six hours after launching the platform, in the classic case of rag pulls. Somewhere over $850,000 (about Rs 68 lakh) were reeled in before SudoRare’s Twitter handle was also deactivated.
The Elliptic report mentions that $24 million (about Rs 191 crore) in NFTs was stolen through scams in May 2022 alone.
Meanwhile, July 2022 has emerged as the month on record for the number of stolen NFTs. Around 4,600 NFTs were stolen last month.
Elliptic says that NFTs lost in the scams include Bored Apps, Mutant Apps, Azuki, Otherside and CloneX.
Compromised social media platforms and phishing messages sent to potential victims resulted in 23 percent of NFT thefts.
