A major in industrial design, Chen became well known in China’s NFT community after writing “all in on NFTs” when filling out a university survey form that solicited students’ career choices. The Chinese government has banned cryptocurrency trading and mining, and OpenSea is not available to users in mainland China.
Regardless of the ban, there is still a community of mainland investors who are putting faith and money into overseas NFT platforms. Chen also sells his own NFT artworks on OpenSea with a collection titled LuckyCot 3D.
The stolen work, from the popular Doodles collectible NFT project, made up roughly half the value of his entire NFT assets, Chen told the South China Morning Post.
In January, one of the world’s biggest NFT collectors, Pranksy, bought one of the Doodles collectibles for 296.69 ether, which at the time was worth the equivalent of US$1.12 million.
NFTs, data stored on a blockchain that represents a digital asset’s ownership and uniqueness, have become hugely popular over the past year, with people spending millions of dollars to snatch up the hottest cartoon avatars and digital artworks.
OpenSea is investigating a series of thefts from a recent phishing scam. Photo: Handout
The fast moving and unregulated NFT space has also become fertile ground for scammers. Last weekend, 17 OpenSea users had NFTs stolen in a targeted phishing attack. The platform said it was still investigating the origins of the scam.
The value of the stolen NFTs could amount to US$1.7 million as the attacker had the equivalent of that amount in ETH from selling some of the stolen NFTs, OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer wrote on Twitter.
Many popular NFT projects’ communities have been subject to phishing attacks, where people click on a seemingly legitimate link that subsequently moves assets out of their crypto wallets. Buyers also repeatedly come across rug pulls, where a team abandons their project and disappears with the investor’s money.
Authorities in mainland China and Hong Kong have ramped up their warnings about the risks involved with NFTs and crypto. Once an asset is stolen, it is extremely difficult for victims to seek recourse given the anonymity of blockchains and the fact that cryptocurrency transactions cannot be cancelled or altered after they are initiated.
Chen told the buyer of his stolen NFT that it was obtained illegally, and offered to buy it back. But the buyer refused, saying they did not want to lose the asset after getting “such a good deal”, and that they did not do anything wrong, according to screenshots Chen posted on Discord.
Chen said he is hoping to further negotiate with the buyer now that OpenSea has frozen the stolen asset.
He indicated that the incident, although “shocking”, has not swayed his decision to pursue NFTs as a career path. “Crypto art is still a career I would like to dedicate myself to,” he said. “I already cannot do without the community.”
