Premint Hack Victims to Be Reimbursed With Over $525,000 in Ether Coins

The reimbursement plans have been announced by Brenden Mulligan, the CEO of Premint.

By Radhika Parashar | Updated: 21 July 2022 11:27 IST

Premint Hack Victims to Be Reimbursed With Over $525,000 in Ether Coins

Photo Credit: Pixabay/ Premint, Pete Linforth

Premint has also acquired wallet authentication tool Vulcan to tighten security

Highlights

Premint hack was one of the biggest cyber-attack this year
Premint CEO said returning all stolen NFTs is impossible
Two costliest NFTs have been re-bought and returned to Premint users

The victims who lost their NFT holdings to a hack attack that struck Premint NFT registration platform this week, are up for a reimbursement from the company. In total, Premint will be paying back its defrauded users a total of over $525,000 (roughly Rs. 4.20 crore) that makes for 340 Ether coins. The development has been announced by Brenden Mulligan, the CEO of Premint. Marking one of the biggest cyber-attacks of 2022, the hacker(s) stole 320 NFTs from the Premint platform and have been known to be re-selling the stolen digital collectibles on NFT marketplaces like OpenSea.

The platform will be depositing ETH coins equivalent to the collection floor price of every stolen NFT, into the 28 crypto wallets that were drained in the hack. The ‘floor price' represents the cheapest available NFT of a given collection.

“You might feel like this compensation isn't enough. But I don't think there's any other scalable and objective way to do this. There is absolutely no way for us to return all the stolen NFTs to their owners. It's impossible,” Mulligan said in a 28-minutes long live-streamed update of the situation on YouTube.

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The Premint chief further revealed that the two most expensive NFTs that were stolen — a BAYC NFT and an Azuki NFT — that were put-up for re-sale by the hacker(s) have been purchased at the listed price and been returned to their pre-hack holders.

> The most valuable NFT stolen this weekend (by orders of magnitude) was @GhosttrapperUSA's #BAYC #3613.
>
> Thrilled to say that with @franklinisbored's help, we got him home. https://t.co/rlurJoeM4Q > > — BrendΞn Mulligan | PREMINT (@mulligan) July 20, 2022

> The second most valuable NFT stolen this weekend was @MrE_NFT's Azuki #9024.
>
> Thanks to @loipokyen's help, he's back in @MrE_NFT's collection https://t.co/EfI7ad5G0i > > — BrendΞn Mulligan | PREMINT (@mulligan) July 20, 2022

In a bid to strengthen its security arrangements, Premint has also announced the acquisition of wallet authentication tool Vulcan, more details of which will be announced next week.

> PREMINT is THRILLED to announce that we've acquired @VulcanAuth!
>
> Vulcan is the safest way to prove wallet / NFT ownership in Discord.
>
> It's being used by @XCOPYART, @moonbirds, @DesLucrece, @osf_nft, @RTFKT and many, many more.
>
> We're VERY excited to help @Rhynotic scale it! pic.twitter.com/sJKPhagz2h > > — PREMINT | NFT Access List Tool (@PREMINT_NFT) July 20, 2022

As described on its website, Premint allows NFT artists to build access-lists for their NFTs with randomly selected collectors and community members to use for presales and giveaways.

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The platform, used by several big names in the NFT sector, was invested with a malicious JavaScript code that asked users to click on a pop-up to verify their identities. Clickers of this pop-ups have become victims of the hack attack.

Premint collaborated with a third-party contractor to facilitate on-chain analysis to identify all the NFTs stolen in this attack.

As per news reports said.), the hacker(s) managed to get hands on expensive pieces from popular series of digital collectibles including Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), Otherside, Moonbirds Oddities, and Goblintown among others.

The 275 Ether tokens that the hacker(s) garnered by flipping these stolen NFTs were then wired into unknown wallets after having been passed from the TornadoCash crypto mixer to make the transaction private and untraceable.

Investigation in the case is still on.

“The past 4 days have been endless meetings with lawyers, accountants, and Web3 leaders. It's been incredibly informative and complicated,” Mullilgan said in a Twitter post.

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Further reading: Cryptocurrency, Premint, NFT, Hack

Radhika Parashar

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Radhika Parashar is a senior correspondent for Gadgets 360. She has been reporting on tech and telecom for the last three years now and will be focussing on writing about all things crypto. Besides this, she is a major sitcom nerd and often replies in Chandler Bing and Michael Scott references. For tips or queries you could reach out to her at RadhikaP@ndtv.com. More