In the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) industry, it isn’t a rare incident in which hackers got access to the wallets and looted them.
The NFT industry has seen some of the biggest scams in the history, and traders were left with nothing in their hands. Most traders in this industry are not able to get back their lost NFTs and track the scammers. Stories of traders getting scammed and NFTs stealing were common at the peak of the NFTs boom.
A similar incident happened with the Solana community, in which the NFTs got stolen by hackers. However, they decided to scam the scammer, recover 25 NFTs and leave the hacker tricked.
Let’s discuss in detail how the events progressed.
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How Did It Start?
The whole scene started when a discord channel of cross-chain gaming development studio Uncharted NFT got hacked. An unchained NFT Discord channel was hacked by some scammers and this news got reported by the World of Solana.
The hackers got access to the wallets of 109 members of the community and drained them. As a result, they got away with 25 World of Solana (WOS) NFTs among which some were highly valuable. The hackers also ran away with 150-plus SOL tokens. Three of the stolen Solana NFTs were rare, extremely valuable, and said to have been in the top 100 NFTs.
This troubled the community, and they decided to fight back against these scammers.
Trap Set By The Solana Community
The members of the Solana community decided to fight back and didn’t want to let this matter go. So, Cryptosile, QuantMaven, and AngelaTNFT teamed up to set up a trap for these scammers. They worked with the development partner of World of Solana (WOS), CyberFrogsNFT, to recover the stolen NFTs.
The WOS developers also decided to give fight back and let these hackers taste their own medicines. The manipulation of royalties’ percentage was the tool through whih they could recover the NFTs.
So, they raised the royalties on the stolen NFTs from the default 5% to 98%.
They also tasked other members of the community to be vigilant and keep an eye on the MagicEden, the Solana marketplace for new NFT listings.
They also decided to use strategies against “Sniping” in case they need to.
“Sniping is a process, which means to place the bid at the last moments of the auction to steal the deal and prevent other participants from placing a higher bid.”
25 NFTs Recovered after the Hacker Tricked
The hacker tricked when after exactly two days, he put 25 stolen NFTs on the Magic Eden Marketplace for auction. After an effectively working plan, the team got access to 15 of the stolen NFTs while 10 out of them were taken by other bidders through sniping.
When the sniper knew about the stealing incident, he decided to cooperate with them and decided to return those 10 NFTs to their deserving and actual owner.
The Solana community wrote a Twitter thread explaining the whole story. They said at the end, “The end result of the whole incident is that you need to use a burner wallet and be extra careful with the process of minting NFTs. It’s the second time our small community is able to retreive the scammed NFTs; Our community is small, but if we are together, we are extremely strong.”
