In a bit of "where are they now" news, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan set up an NFT platform last week called Fractal, dedicated to selling in-game items and cosmetics on the blockchain as NFTs. However, the platform has already been the target of an NFT scam, costing its victims a grand total of about $150,000.
NFTs are an extremely controversial topic by themselves, being prone to scams, art theft, and discussions about their environmental impacts. Despite this, video game companies have been dabbling into them with less-than stellar results, assuming they don't backpedal due to fan backlash. Yesterday, another scam hit the newly-created Fractal, when someone managed to gain access to the Discord's bot and claimed that Fractal was minting 3,333 NFTs for 1 Solana each (worth about $177.) However, the link led to "Fractai," not Fractal, and it managed to "sell" 3,294 NFTs before the plug was pulled. In total, over $150,000 was stolen from the buyers.
Well, @justinkan's @fractalwagmi is going well...
— Zach Bussey (@zachbussey) December 21, 2021
Their actual Discord Bot was hacked encouraging people to mint 3333 NFTs for 1 Solana (worth $177 each).
But the link is to Fractai, not Fractal... 3294 just lost nearly $600,000 combined. pic.twitter.com/mnSaa0wOnp
In response, Fractal released a statement telling the community about what happened. Fractal said that those scammed would be refunded, warned users about using their best judgement in crypto, and, somewhat hilariously, threw in a brief boast about how "with over 100,000 members in our community, it's quite impressive that the hacker only managed to dupe .3% of our community." Meanwhile, Justin Kan issued a short video statement of his own on Twitter, which included warnings that the Discord scam Fractal faced had happened on other NFT communities as well.
