CryptoBatz NFTs, launched by the world-renowned English singer Ozzy Osbourne, were targeted by scammers on a fake Discord server.
The scam went down after users joined a fraudulent Discord server. People who orchestrated the scam capitalized on the fact that the actual server of CryptoBatz underwent a name change - from cryptobatznft to cryptobatz.
The CryptoBatz project had been advertised in December of 2021, and 9,666 pieces of NFT art, reincarnating Ozzy Osbourne’s controversial act of chewing off the head of a bat, were sold through their official Discord server.
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However, CryptoBatz and Ozzy Osbourne himself did not remove old tweets that had the previous URL, so people kept joining the server with the old URL. Consequently, scammers took over the old Discord server name which led to multiple people losing their crypto.
The way the scam worked was people were asked to confirm the purchases of the NFTs by clicking on a link issued by the server.
Sadly, scammers, in control of the Discord server, posted a "phishing" link that wasn't actually what the community thought it would be. Users who clicked on the link, wanting to "verify their purchase", actually gave up their wallet information. This led to scammers gaining control of their digital assets.
While Ozzy Osbourne hasn’t yet commented on the issue, the official CryptoBatz Twitter account posted a tweet warning users to be careful of fake Discord channels, and that they are working to shut down all CryptoBatz scam servers.
In an interview with Verge, one of the creators of the CryptoBatz NFT collection Sutter Systems commented on the issue, stating that the blame solely should go to Discord. He added:
"Although we feel very sorry for the people that have fallen prey to these scams, we cannot take responsibility for the actions of scammers exploiting Discord – a platform that we have absolutely no control over."
This obviously indicates that people who suffered from the scam will probably not be reimbursed as the creators seemingly had no idea this was going on.
NFTs have been under a lot of controversies after their release, and even had their first rug pull which led to the loss of $1.3M worth of crypto. However, this might be the first instance where scammers were able to impersonate the actual creators of NFTs by acting on a simple name change of the Discord server.
