How hackers stole millions with a Minecraft NFT project

The enthusiasm generated by non-fungible tokens (NFT) has proved beneficial to threat actors, who in recent months have created supposed NFT investment projects that disappear overnight along with investors’ money.

This seemed to be the case with Blockverse, a project inspired by the popular video game Minecraft. Apparently, the creators of the project sold a total of 10,000 tokens at $124 USD, making a total of $1.2 million USD in less than an hour.

Despite the enthusiasm for this NFT collection, just a few days after the token sale all traces of the project disappeared, including its Discord server, its Minecraft profiles and Blockverse’s website, in what looked like a classic exit scam.

When most of Blockverse’s buyers had already resigned themselves to losing their investment, the creators of the NFT project reappeared on social networks to apologize for the sudden disappearance and ensuring that it is all due to the harassment they were victims of during the days after the launch of the event: “We closed these profiles to prevent harassment from continuing; the plan was to reopen the platforms once everything calmed down. There is no reason for us to leave permanently,” said the developers of Blockverse.

Although dozens of buyers of these NFT tokens used social networks to show their disappointment and distrust, the developers of the project assure that they will continue working to regain the trust of investors: “We still believe in our project; so that everyone else can regain faith, we are in talks with specialists in the field and thus find the best way to continue.”

Blockverse buyers have also proposed a plan for the relaunch of the project, which consists of the developers handing over control of Blockverse to their investors, although at the moment it is unknown which way the NFT project will continue.    

To learn more about information security risks, malware variants, vulnerabilities and information technologies, feel free to access the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) websites.