Ozzy Osbourne recently launched his CryptoBatz NFT collection featuring 9,666 individual bats. CryptoBatz organizes its own NFT community on Discord, which is unfortunately where everything went wrong for the project. According to The Verge, the CryptoBatz originally used the link discord.gg/cryptobatznft before switching over to discord.gg/cryptobatz. Nobody on the CryptoBatz team disabled the original link or deleted previous tweets with the link, which is when scammers got a hold of it.
Anyone who tries to log into the old, now scammy Discord is asked for a verification of their crypto assets via a phishing link that will empty their cryptocurrency wallets. The Verge spoke to Tim Silman, a CryptoBatz that got scammed, who said he lost about $300 or $400 in Ethereum.
"I've seen at least a dozen people on Twitter voicing this same issue," Silman said. "If you look at the transactions on Etherscan, others lost a lot more than me."
Sutter Systems, developers of the CryptoBatz, have since commented and blamed 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," Jepeggi said. "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."
