Artist Mike “Beeple” Winkelmann has found himself the target of phishing scammers once again, warning users that the URL link to his official Discord server has been “hacked” — sending unknowing new members to a wallet-draining Discord channel if they follow the link.
On Oct. 3, the NFT artist warned users not to enter a “scam” Discord channel and check it out because it “will drain your wallet.”
However, Beeple wasn’t the first to notice the sleight of hand URL, as Twitter user maxnaut.eth noted in a post hours earlier that the Discord link connected to Beeple: Everydays – 2020 Collection on NFT marketplace OpenSea may have been “hijacked”.
The screenshot shared by maxnaut.eth states that the URL refers to “CollabLand wallet drainer”, which displays a Collab.Land Bot on Discord directing members to verify account ownership – instead draining their wallets, noting:
“Maybe your Discord URL has been hacked and your team isn’t updating it on OS. You need to change that ASAP or people are going to be wanted.”
While Beeple claims URLs have been hacked and Discord is to blame, other members of the Crypto Twitter community argue that lax security measures are really to blame.
NFT analyst and blockchain investigator OKHotshot responded to the artist’s announcement, stating that the URLs were not hacked but instead claiming that “mismanagement of contentious URLs allows this to happen, perhaps just as it happened to CryptoBatz.”
While cybersecurity firm Black Alchemy Solutions Group commented that it believed it was not a “dispute issue”.
This is a problem related to the mismanagement of the Beeple Information Security device. If you haven’t already, set vCISO (security administrator), web3 is not natively secure. ”
The artist appears to have fixed the misleading URLs on Discord, according to maxnaut.eth, stating that “it looks like Beep Man picked it up and fixed it now.”
At the time of writing, the Discord link in the affected OpenSea list also appears to be gone.
Related: 8 Sneaky Cryptocurrency Scams on Twitter Right Now
Beeple’s social media and messaging platforms appear to be a popular target for scammers and hackers, after it sold some of the most expensive NFTs on record, including the first 5,000 days, a collection of 5,000 pieces of artwork that sold for $69.3 million.
Elon Musk’s spacecraft maker SpaceX, tech giant Apple, luxury brand Louis Vuitton and other high-profile companies and individuals are listed as customers on Beeple’s website.
In May, a scam netted $438,000 worth of cryptocurrency and NFTs by hijacking his Twitter account, which was linked to a raffle allegedly linked to a Louis Vuitton NFT collaboration.
In November 2021, his Discord was part of another scam, where an admin account was hacked and a fake NFT dropped was announced, infecting the scammers with about 38 ether.
ETH
pointers down
$1,267
, valued at $176,378.14 at about that time.
Beeple did not disclose how many users may have been affected by the current malicious Discord links.
Cointelegraph has reached out to Beeple but did not receive an immediate response at the time of publication.
