Beeple's Twitter Hacked, Scammers Net $430K In Ethereum And NFTs

Popular digital artist Beeple saw his Twitter Inc (NYSE: TWTR) account hacked over the weekend, resulting in a phishing incident that netted scammers over $430,000 in stolen Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) and NFTs.

What Happened: MetaMask security analyst Harry Denley first raised the alarm on Sunday, telling users the link in Beeple’s Twitter bio redirected to a phishing website that would automatically drain user wallets once they had been connected.

Once you've connected your wallet, will initiate a mint() contract call to 0x7b69c4f2ACF77300025E49DbDbB65B068b2Fda7D, which will send 1ETH to the contract.

As of typing the website is not weaponised to "drain" wallets by filling the wallet tx queue (like we've seen before) pic.twitter.com/GLb56r5ZDj

— harry.eth  (whg.eth) (@sniko_) May 22, 2022

This was later confirmed by Beeple himself, who tweeted that “anything too good to be true IS A F*CKING SCAM.”

Stay safe out there, anything too good to be true IS A FUCKING SCAM.

And as side note, there will never be a SURPRISE MINT I mention one time in one place starting at 6am Sunday morning. 

— beeple (@beeple) May 22, 2022

On-chain data shows that the first link posted earned the scammers a total of 36 ETH worth around $73,000. The second link resulted in an even bigger jackpot – a cumulative total of over $365,000 in ETH and big-ticket NFTs including Mutant Apes and Otherdeeds.

The NFTs were then sold on OpenSea and the ETH was put into a coin mixer by scammers attempting to launder the illicitly obtained funds.

Beeple, whose real name is Michael Joseph Winkelmann, has had some of the most successful NFT sales to date and is widely credited for bringing the industry more mainstream attention. The digital artist sold his ‘The First 5000 Days’ NFT for a record $69 million last year.

See Also: HOW TO BUY NON-FUNGIBLE TOKENS (NFTS)

Price Action: According to data from Benzinga Pro, ETH was trading at $2,041 at press time, up 3.54% over the last 24 hours.