The OpenSea drama continues to stir up controversy, and although many NFT owners took their massive losses, one of the victims had enough and decided to take his case to court.
Timothy McKimmy, an NFT collector, sued the OpenSea NFT Marketplace after losing his Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT due to what he described as a malicious attack on the platform.
How Thimothy McKimmy lost his Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT
As explained by Thimothy McKimmy – who goes by the nickname McKimmy on OpenSea – in or around February 7, 2022, a hacker exploited a security vulnerability to illegally access his wallet and sell his Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT to a third party for 0.01 WETH.
Considering Ether’s price as of Feb 21, 2022, McKimmy’s NFT sell price would be around $25.73, which is practically equivalent to giving away the token given that the collection floor price is 91.9 ETH, according to data from OpenSea.
Because NFTs are unique tokens, there is no way to determine a price for all of the tokens in the same way that the value of fungible tokens such as ETH or BTC is determined. The price floor exists to denote the minimum price that sellers are willing to accept for their tokens at a given point in time. In other words, the cheapest Bored Ape currently costs 91.9 ETH or $236K. Ouch!
In fact, right now McKimmy’s lost Ape is now for sale for 225 ETH, or $607,000 on OpenSea, and as McKimmy says in his lawsuit, the current owner has refused to return his Ape to him.
OpenSea and the Phishing Attacks
As Cryptopotato previously reported, a few days ago, a group of OpenSea users began reporting that they had lost their tokens after falling victim to a massive phishing attack.
The attacker took advantage of a critical moment to launch his scam. OpenSea was updating its smart contract precisely to protect users from previous malicious practices. To perform the update, OpenSea sends official emails to its users, asking them to authorize the execution of the new contract.
Apparently, the attacker took the opportunity to trick some users into signing a malicious code that gave him control of their wallets, and that’s how McKimmy’s precious Ape changed hands for 20 bucks.
McKimmy argues that OpenSea “(failed) to implement policies and procedures to prevent, identify, detect, respond, mitigate, contain, and/or remediate security breaches”, and seeks payment for “the Bored Ape appraisal, and/or damages in excess of $1,000,000.
