Ozzy Osbourne's NFT Project Led to Phishing Scam of More Than $40,000 USD

Ozzy Osbourne‘s new NFT project CryptoBatz has fallen victim to a phishing scam causing tens of thousands of dollars to be drained from buyers.

The exploit was made possible after the project changed URLs for its Discord channel from discord.gg/cryptobatznft to just discord.gg/cryptobatz. Despite the swap, the project failed to delete previous tweets promoting the old URL, which scammers subsequently managed to register. The false Discord server brought in 1,330 users, who were then subjected to a phishing scam from links a bot sent regarding verification of their crypto assets in order to participate in the sale.

According to Tim Silman, who lost money to the scam himself, roughly $400 USD in ETH was taken from his wallet, but many other users suffered worse fates. “I’ve seen at least a dozen people on Twitter voicing this same issue,” he told The Verge. “If you look at the transactions on Etherscan, others lost a lot more than me.” When looking into the receiving account, Silman found it contained almost $41,000 USD in ETH transfers.

In response to the scam, Sutter Systems’ co-founder “Jepeggi” says that Discord is to blame. “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,” he remarked. “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.”

Elsewhere in the crypto world, Tom Brady’s NFT platform has announced a $170 million USD funding round.