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Ozzy Osbourne fans scammed following NFT campaign blunder

By | Published on Monday 24 January 2022

Ozzy Osbourne

Ozzy Osbourne fans may have been scammed out of tens of thousands of dollars worth of cryptocurrency due to a blunder that occurred during the promotion of official NFTs for the Black Sabbath frontman.

Last month, Osbourne launched CryptoBatz – a collection of 9666 digital bats – for pre-sale, before properly putting the digital collectables on sale on Thursday.

“CryptoBatz is a fucking mental project for NFT collectors and fans”, Osbourne told Rolling Stone in December. “The design pays tribute to one of my most iconic on-stage moments and is a chance to acquire a rare piece of art history. I love it!”

The issue, reports The Verge, is that at launch, a link to the Discord channel where the campaign was being organised was changed.

The original URL was then taken over by scammers. And thanks to various official tweets promoting the project with the original URL remaining online, more than 1000 fans appear to have then signed up to a group managed by the scammers.

Once in that group, people were asked to verify their assets and then directed to a phishing site to connect their crypto wallets.

One person who reckons that he might have lost about $400 worth of Ether – Etheruem’s cryptocurrency – as a result of the scam says that the wallet he connected to appears to have received transactions worth more than $40,000 on 20 Jan as CryptoBatz sales went live.

After being contacted by The Verge, the developer of CryptoBatz, Sutter Systems, removed a tweet with more than 4000 retweets that contained the original Discord link. However, it placed responsibility for the scam with Discord

“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”, Sutter Systems co-founder ‘Jepeggi’ told The Verge.

“In our opinion this situation and hundreds of others that have taken place across other projects in the NFT space could have easily been prevented if Discord just had a better response/support/fraud team in place to help big projects like ours”.

Discord corporate comms exec Peter Day meanwhile said in a statement: “Our Trust & Safety team is in touch with the server owners and are investigating the incident. Our team takes action when we become aware of attacks like this one, including banning users and shutting down servers”.



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