Ozzy Osbourne fans lost thousand of dollars in bogus NFT link scam and no one is doing anything about it
Ozzy Osbourne fans saw the dark side of the crypto world after the team behind the launch of his CryptoBatz” NFT collection shared a scam link that led to fans losing thousands of dollars.
Just two days after 9,666 digital Ozzy bat NFT tokens were minted, fans were targeted by a phishing scam that drained cryptocurrency from their digital wallets.
Like most NFT projects, CryptoBatz uses Discord to communicate with its community. The official CryptoBatz Discord can accessed through the short link discord.gg/cryptobatz but at launch had used the slightly different URL discord.gg/cryptobatznft.
When the project switched to the new URL, scammers set up a fake Discord server at the old url and since tweets that referenced it had not been deleted, previous tweets from Ozzy himself were still directing fans to the old Discord server now controlled by con artists.
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The tweet below from CryptoBatz below containing the old URL was retweeted 4,000 times and got hundreds of replies. It was finally deleted three weeks layer after The Verge contacted the company. More than 1300 fans clicked on the scam link according to The Verge.
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‘It wasn’t me’
The Verge investigation found that 14.6 ETH ($40,895) had likely been collected by the scammers on January 20th alone.
So far Ozzy has been silent and the CrtytoBatz team is blaming Discord, Neither is offering to help the injured fans.
“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, the developers of the CryptoBatz NFT said in a statement.
Bruce Houghton is Founder and Editor of Hypebot and MusicThinkTank and serves as a Senior Advisor to Bandsintown which acquired both publications in 2019. He is the Founder and President of the Skyline Artists Agency and a professor for the Berklee College Of Music.
