Porsche cut its minting of a new NFT collection short after a dismal turnout and backlash from the crypto community, allowing threat actors to fill the void by creating phishing sites that steal digital assets from cryptocurrency wallets.
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are digital assets stored on a blockchain, representing proof of authenticity and ownership of an item, such as an artwork image, music, and anything that can take the form of digital media.
The German automaker launched its first NFT mint last Monday, January 23, 2023, offering a digital replica of the iconic 911 car for 0.911 ETH, valued at about $1,500.
However, delays in the rollout of the collection caused frustration in the community, as only about 20% of the promised 7,500 NFTs had been minted after 24 hours and three minting waves.
To make matters worse, a flourishing NFT resale market was set up over at OpenSea, where it was cheaper to buy the Porsche collectibles than get the original, which devalued the assets immediately and further infuriated investors and traders.
Eventually, on January 24, Porsche announced they would stop the minting process and cut the supply until they figured out how to get the NFT debut right. The actual minting process didn't stop until January 25 at 6 AM UTC-5, giving scammers plenty of chance to leverage the confusing situation.
As mint cuts short, scammers flourish
While the Porsche NFTs rose in value in the coming days, so did the scale of fraudulent activity around the mint, with threat actors launching phishing sites to impersonate an ongoing Porsche mint.
However, when users connected their crypto wallets to the phishing sites, they would attempt to drain the assets and funds in the wallets.
This forced Porsche to warn on January 27 about fake accounts promoting the continuation of the NFT minting process to steal people's details and assets.
Today, over a week after Porsche's failed NFT launch, several scammers continue to trick people looking to obtain custom digital 911 NFTs.
BleepingComputer had found a notable case of a now-suspended Twitter account with almost 11,000 followers impersonating Porsche's NFT-dedicated account.
While this account linked to Porsche's real Discord channel, it also linked to a malicious site ("porsche-nfts.com") that's visually a clone of Porsche's genuine NFT portal at "nft.porsche.com."
While the actual site has a notice about the minting closure, the fake one pretends that the procedure is still underway, inviting users to link their wallets.
Also, the fake Twitter account had a pinned tweet saying that the remaining Porsche NFTs are now available to claim for free while also promising the renewal of the stock for the remaining community.
The fake account had disabled user comments under all posts and even re-tweets posts of the real Porsche account, which made it easy to trick people into getting a digital 911 NFT while missing signs of fraud.
The scam account was shut down today, with a previous one used by the same scammer appearing also to have been suspended.
However, other accounts are likely taking advantage of the Porsche Web3 snafu, so aspiring investors are advised to be extra vigilant.
Comments
TsVk! - 1 year ago
Somehow not feeling any sympathy for anyone involved.
GT500 - 1 year ago
FYI: NFT stands for "Non-fungible token"
https://ethereum.org/en/nft/
Anyway, NFT's are always a scam, regardless of the source. They're literally nothing more than an entry in a blockchain (usually Etherium) that describes a physical or digital asset, and buying one doesn't guarantee that you actually have any rights over the actual asset that the NFT describes. Look up information on the legal issues surrounding NFT's (LegalEagle on YouTube has a decent video) for more info.
horsedoggs - 1 year ago
Why is an auto manufacturing company involved in blockchain anyway? these company’s are meant to be promoting “green” carbon friendly transport solutions for the future. Block chain is the complete opposite of this…
TsVk! - 1 year ago
free money printing of course
GT500 - 1 year ago
A ton of companies saw the poor people who were suckered into buying into NFT's early before they were widely exposed as a scam spending ungodly amounts of money on them, and the executives saw a potential source of large amounts of revenue that required very little work or investment (proportional to the potential revenue at least). Companies love selling things with very low manufacturing cost and a low entry level to get started in, which also happen to return massive profits, so as many companies in as many industries as possible started investigating how they could funnel as much of that money into their bank accounts as possible.
Also it's important to note that Etherium doesn't require heavy GPU processing for mining anymore, so instead of running mining GPU's for years to get enough Etherium to do this they would literally have to buy it from an exchange and then put some of it as proof of stake to generate new Etherium coins. Granted I don't know of any other cryptocurrencies that have made such a switch away from a proof of work model, however since NFT's usually use the Etherium blockchain and thus require Etherium coins (whatever they're actually called) to mint, the energy usage complaints about Etherium (and thus most NFT's) has basically been nullified.
It's also important to note that in cases where companies create their own blockchains to handle their NFT's, they can determine how their blockchain works and how NFT's are minted, so they don't necessarily have to use a proof of work system if they don't want to (and they probably wouldn't want to as it would be a waste of time and power vs a system where they don't have to pay anything to mint their NFT's). I don't know if there are any sort of cryptographic calculations necessary when minting an NFT, but at least the major energy inefficiency of Etherium has been nullified by the move to proof of stake.
All of that being said, I still say NFT's are a scam (as do many others who know more that I), and companies that keep trying to do them are only going to hurt their reputations as the majority of people seem to either be aware that they're a scam or just have zero interest in them.