It was reported by multiple people on Twitter that they had lost their crypto art and had suffered from unauthorized purchases via their credit cards because their accounts on Nifty Gateway were compromised. A representative of the Nifty Gateway did not disclose how much art had been reported stolen but did say that a small group of users had been affected. According to a Twitter user who had been maintaining a tally of the reports regarding stolen artwork claimed that NFTs or non-fungible tokens worth $150,000 had been stolen on Nifty Gateway. A number of the pieces that were listed by the user belonged to artists who had managed to generate significant momentum in the crypto-art sales, which included Trevor Jones.
One of the first individuals who had reported an issue with their account on Nifty Gateway was Michael J. Miraflor. He said that someone had used his credit card for purchasing digital art on Nifty Gateway valued at $10,000 and had then transferred his digital art pieces to a different account before selling them off through Discord. He disclosed that he was in contact with Griffin Cock Foster, the co-founder of the Nifty Gateway, but he had been informed that digital tokens couldn’t be transferred back to him after they had been resold.
Miraflor stated that he was going to file a police report. According to a representative of the Nifty Gateway, they hadn’t seen any evidence of the platform being hacked and that valid credentials had been used for the accounts that were affected. These thefts could have been a result of not enabling two-factor authentication or reusing passwords, the former being an optional security measure. The representative said that some of the NFTs included in these account takeovers had been sold in transactions conducted over Twitter or Discord.
They encouraged all customers of the Nifty Gateway to only use the official Nifty Gateway marketplace for purchasing their NFTs. The risk of fraud and theft has always been associated with the crypto world. Since blockchain transactions are irreversible and anonymous, a compromised password can prove to be a significant risk for those who have invested thousands of dollars in digital assets. The spotlight has recently been on NFTs as a hot new kind of crypto asset, but they also have the same risks. On Thursday, a digital art piece by Beeple was sold in a Christie’s auction for a value of $70 million.
The Nifty Gateway has become a popular platform for purchasing and selling NFTs. Recently, an auction was hosted by the site for Grimes that accumulated around $5.8 million within 20 minutes. Nifty Gateway is also one of the handful of platforms that allow users to directly use their credit cards for purchasing from the website; other websites like Foundations and SuperRare require their users to have a digital wallet for buying anything using ether. Miraflor also revealed on Twitter that he had gotten in touch with his credit card company for preventing any more purchases.
