Bored Ape Holder Loses Multiples NFTs Collectively Worth $570,000 in Direct Swap Scam

The scammer used images of actual Bored Apes to create fake replicas and uploaded the same ones to OpenSea.

By Shomik Sen Bhattacharjee | Updated: 6 April 2022 12:00 IST

Bored Ape Holder Loses Multiples NFTs Collectively Worth $570,000 in Direct Swap Scam

Photo Credit: Facebook/ BAYC

The scammer made use of a UI loophole on Swap.Kiwi to pull off the NFT theft

Highlights

Platforms like Swap.Kiwi allow NFT owners to trade directly
The scammer used a flaw in the Swap.Kiwi UI to pull off the fraud
All the stolen NFT in the fake swap have been sold at a lower price

An unknown Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) non-fungible token (NFT) owner, known as “s27”, recently lost roughly $570,000 (roughly Rs. 4.3 crore) worth of NFTs after exchanging his BAYC NFT and two Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) tokens for fraudulent NFTs deceptively disguised as genuine. Among the lost NFTs was a "bubble gum ape”. The user claimed to have used an NFT exchange platform named “Swap.Kiwi” for the swap which allows for direct NFT swaps between collectors, reducing transaction fees.

The potentially fraudulent transaction was first spotted by crypto enthusiast who goes by the synonym “quit” (@0xQuit on Twitter), thanks to his Discord server configured to track BAYC and MAYC listings that are at least 5 percent below their floor price in Ether. “The pings are rare, but when they happen it generally means one of two things: somebody is panic selling, or somebody is compromised. When I saw the notification for #1584, I instantly knew it was the latter.”

2/ I track ape listings under floor (5% trigger) in my discord server. The pings are rare, but when they happen it generally means one of two things: somebody is panic selling, or somebody is compromised. When I saw the notification for #1584, I instantly knew it was the latter
— quit (@0xQuit) April 5, 2022

Quit, who tweeted out his findings in a Twitter thread, discovered that not only did the scammed user transfer his valuable NFTs to a scammer, but he was also the initiator of the trade. Quit went on to track down the scammer's NFTs that s27 received after the swap was made. All of them appeared as genuine BAYC tokens but actually weren't.

4/ Further digging showed that he traded on swapkiwi, a trading site similar to NFTtrader or SudoSwap. Furthermore, he *initiated* a trade to lose his apes, which is certainly not normal behavior. I decided to play with KiwiSwap and see how this could've happened ????
— quit (@0xQuit) April 5, 2022

Quit notes that Swap.Kiwi displays a “green checkmark” to verify that tokens are authentic, but because of the way the checkmark shows up on the UI, it can be easily counterfeited via a simple image editor — and that's exactly what the scammer did. Essentially, he downloaded some “jpegs” depicting a few expensive BAYC apes and added a fake watermark so that they would appear like the real deal when displayed on Swap.Kiwi.

6/ Well, the hacker used that to his advantage. Here are the apes that s27 received in return: https://t.co/08bubCsCpL https://t.co/pIgu3mRGVY https://t.co/r3svn1PAqo

You'll see that each has the green check added directly to the image. pic.twitter.com/qc6E3bGibg
— quit (@0xQuit) April 5, 2022

Shortly after receiving the BAYC and two MAYC NFTs, the scammer sold them for ETH 98.85 (currently around $350,000 or roughly Rs. 2.5 crore), ETH 23 ($81,000 or roughly Rs. 60 lakh), and ETH 25.25 ($90,000 or roughly Rs. 68 lakh) — worth a total of $521,000 (roughly Rs. 4 crore). However, these listings were lower than their corresponding floor prices, placing s27's potential loss in the ballpark of $570,000 (roughly Rs. 4.3 crore), according to Quit.

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