A New York-based art collector and gallery owner is the latest victim of NFT art theft. Todd Kramer, co-founder of Ross+Kramer Gallery, revealed in a series of now-deleted tweets that he was a victim of hacking.
Kramer claimed that 15 NFTs disappeared from his wallet, and to make matters worse, they were from the prized Bored Ape Yacht Club and the Mutant Ape Yacht Club collections.
In total, the stolen collection was worth an estimated $2.2 million according to Artnews.com.
“I have been hacked, all my apes are gone.” Further adding that it was “the worst night of his life”.
Following the tweets, it was revealed that Kramer may have eventually recovered some of his NFTs, after the intervention of the buyers and the OpenSea marketplace.
He updated his Twitter followers hours later, posting, “Update.. All Apes are frozen,,. Waiting for opensea team to get in,,,lessons learned. Use a hard wallet…”
However, OpenSea’s intervention led to some users wondering whether NFTs were truly decentralized, if the platform can simply freeze the assets. Others argued that OpenSea only froze users’ ability to interact with the NFTs on that app, but had no control overall, particularly on a different platform.
This is not the first documented NFT theft. Last October, $2.7 million worth of NFTs in the Evil Ape series disappeared, followed by the theft of 3 Bored Ape NFTs just a month later.
As the adoption of this art form grows, similar incidents will only increase.
