About 130 Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and 268 Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) NFTs worth over $18.5 million have been marked as “reported for suspicious activity” on OpenSea. This means that previous owners of these NFTs have contacted the marketplace and identified them as “stolen”.
However, this list doesn’t include the 153 Azuki NFTs that have been frozen, the 202 stolen CloneX, or the 70 Moonbirds. Experts say that these tokens would add up to another $6.9 million of stolen NFTs if sold at current floor prices. As such, over $25.4 million of non-fungible tokens have been marked stolen.
It should be noted that while many NFTs are considered stolen as per their former owners, these owners themselves in most cases authorized the transaction without realizing it. This can be attributed to phishing scams via email, Discord, or Twitter. OpenSea has the policy to disable allegedly stolen NFTs from being traded on its platform. However, a trader – known as Franklin – pointed out that OpenSea’s reach only goes so far. It may be possible to the locked NFTs on other NFT marketplaces, such as LooksRare.
Other traders like Jameson, the holder of Moonbirds NFT, argued that OpenSea’s policy for stolen tokens is flawed and too centralized. They highlighted that the renowned marketplace has sweeping power to freeze what are ultimately supposed to be decentralized blockchain assets. Blake Petersen, the Twilio software engineer, believes the problem could also be applied to all of Web3. He said Web3 is bagging a centralized API to let users get indexed so they can present an authenticated PFP on a stupid social media app.
