The FBI recently issued a warning about scammers posing as NFT developers in order to perpetrate cryptocurrency theft.  NFT stands for Non-Fungible Tokens which are assets that have been tokenized on a blockchain to make them unique.  Many NFTs involve digital art and collectibles such as trading cards and art and while the popularity of NFTs has somewhat waned in the last couple of years, NFTs still are looked upon by some people as valuable investments.  The FBI has found that scammers are both hacking the social media accounts of NFT developers or creating cloned social media accounts that appear to be websites of legitimate NFT developers on which they promote the sale of valuable, “limited supply” NFTs.  The scammers then lure their victims into connecting their cryptocurrency wallets to cryptocurrency wallets of the scammers in order to purchase the NFTs.  Victims falling for the scam who connect their cryptocurrency wallets to the cryptocurrency wallets of the scammers end up having their cryptocurrency wallets emptied.

TIPS

Check the social media account of a NFT developer to make sure it is legitimate and not a cloned account.  In particular check for spelling or grammar errors, account history, screen name and creation date to confirm that the site is legitimate.  Whenever accessing a website that requests you connect your cryptocurrency wallet, make sure the website is legitimate.  One way to do this is to go to ICANN which registers domain names and put in the URL of the site you are directed to in order to see if it is owned by the real developers or scammers.  An ICANN lookup will let you know who really owns the particular website.  Here is a link to ICANN’s lookup tool. https://lookup.icann.org/en

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