Ozzy Osbourne Fans Lose Approximately $41,000 in Crypto Over NFT Scam

Morten Skovgaard, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
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While they seem like the new frontier for digital art, NFTs are definitely still risky business. The extent to which the artists promoting them know how to manage them, and just how sound an investment they really are, remains unsure. Case in point, Ozzy Osbourne fans have just got scammed during the Prince of Darkness’ recent NFT campaign — to the tune of $41,000 in cryptocurrency.

As reported by MetalSucks, Ozzy, in conjunction with Sutter Systems, recently launched an NFT campaign called ‘CryptoBatz’ to honor the 40th anniversary of Ozzy biting the head off of a bat. Ozzy released 9,666 totally unique digital bats for fans to buy.

But as The Verge points out, Ozzy’s people weren’t ready for the speed with which Internet scammers could hijack the project:

“Like the majority of NFT projects, CryptoBatz uses Discord as a place to organize its community. The official CryptoBatz Discord is now accessed through the short link discord.gg/cryptobatz. But previously, the project used a slightly different vanity URL at discord.gg/cryptobatznft.

“When the project switched to the new URL, scammers set up a fake Discord server at the old one. But neither CryptoBatz nor Ozzy Osbourne took the precaution of deleting tweets referencing the previous URL, meaning that old tweets from Osbourne himself were left directing followers to a server now controlled by scammers.

“Inside the server, a bot spoofing community management service Collab Land asked users to verify their crypto assets to participate in the server — but directed users to a phishing site where they were prompted to connect their cryptocurrency wallets.”

Discord claim they are “aware of the incident and in contact with the affected team.” But as you might expect, Sutter Systems, the company working with Ozzy on this, have released a statement saying that this sucks, but it ain’t their bad:

“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. 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.”

Imagine getting fleeced thousands of dollars over a pixellated bat. Mind-blowing.

More on this story as it unfolds. But if these fans want to hire a lawyer, may we suggest…

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Words by Chris Krovatin