Opensea Exploit Led “Opportunistic Buyer” to Steal $751K Worth of NFTs

The month of January continues billing losses to crypto investors. While the entire market is in a state of decline itself, even the NFT market is suffering from exploits. The most recent one took place this morning, causing $751k worth of losses.

The “Opportunistic Buyer”

After reports of random Mutant Ape NFTs being sold randomly began arising, a deeper dive into the situation brought an exploit to light.

One particular buyer dubbed the “Opportunistic Buyer” by Etherescan managed to gain an advantage of the exploit and purchase multiple NFTs at prices way lower than their floor price.

The user’s address, which goes by jpegdegenlove, managed to purchase 7 NFTs ranging from the Mutant Ape collection to the Cool Cats and even the CyberKongz. Of the three, one particular NFT was sold for a mere 0.77 Ether, which brought the situation to light.

Here’s a laundry list of stolen @BoredApeYC, @coolcatsnft and more that the thief is actively stealing right now due to the @opensea exploit. I feel bad for all these people. pic.twitter.com/msl6bCYMfO

— Hustler (@0xHustler) January 24, 2022

The exploit led to an overall exploit of 332 ETH, which is equivalent to $751k at press time.

The “Opportunistic Buyer” found a front-end exploit that enabled him to buy the aforementioned NFTs for their older prices when they were listed before. Thus as soon as the reports surfaced, all NFT holders were urged to cancel the old listing of their NFTs using the Rarible tool.

Just a little over two weeks ago, the tool was launched to protect NFT holders from these kinds of situations exactly. Holders can find out about all their listings and cancel them using the tool while also eliminating the possibility of the NFTs being bought off the blockchain.

Not the First Time

A similar exploit earlier in the month also led to some NFTs being sold for lower than floor prices. Todd Kramer of the Ross+Kramer gallery lost 15 of his NFTs, which were cumulatively worth around $2.2 million. This incident is what actually led Rarible to develop the aforementioned tool.

The increasing frequency of such exploits makes investors concerned about their NFTs, which could lead them to look into other options than Opensea.