Fraudsters pretend to be the creators of the Moonbirds NFT collection to steal cryptocurrency

The NFT Moonbirds collection has attracted considerable attention — to date, the collection’s trading volume is a third of a billion dollars, and the entire collection was sold out instantly (it first went on sale only on Saturday!). So it is not surprising that fraudsters decided to take advantage of this — a significant fraudulent campaign has been launched on Twitter.

What’s your favorite @moonbirds_xyz? pic.twitter.com/PFL3CGczHL

— Ryan Carson (?,?) (@ryancarson) April 2, 2022

The popularity of the collection is due to the presence of Beeple among its founders — it was he who sold a digital collage of five thousand drawings for $ 69 million, which is the world’s most expensive NFT token. Beeple is a member of the Proof Collective, a group of 1000 people. And if in December, participation in this association cost about $ 7,900, today the entry threshold has increased significantly and amounts to 98 ETH ($ 285,670).

It is not surprising that such a popular project as Moonbirds has attracted fraudsters. They began to massively buy up verified Twitter accounts (with a blue tick), after which they rename the account to Moonbirds or a similar one and write about the availability of additional drop sales that can be used to buy tokens.

It is logical that such an offer does not go unnoticed, and users who can afford the purchase go to phishing sites, where they simply lose their accumulated funds after connecting their wallet.

In some cases, it’s not just about buying verified accounts, but also about hacking — for example, Senator Bernie Sanders' son Larry Sanders fell victim to this (he has now regained access to his account, which does not preclude potentially similar cases).

It is worth noting that Nassim Taleb, author of the book Black Swan, believes that the probability of the NFT market collapse is very high. At the same time, other analysts are quite the opposite and are confident in an imminent market boom after NFTs are launched on the Instagram platform.