US prosecutors have charged Sofiance and Lehia, who is currently being held in Morocco, with stealing $450,000 worth of cryptocurrency and NFT from a victim in Manhattan by creating a fake open-sea market in 2021.
A statement from the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York reported that the defendant illegally obtained the victim’s initial phrase by plagiarism and used it to steal their collection of digital art.
Case details
Oulahya stole four NFTs from the victim’s OpenSea account. This was one each from the Bored Ape Yacht Club, Meebit, Bored Ape Kennel Club and Crypto Dad series. Besides, the defendant also stole cryptocurrencies from the hacked Manhattan victim’s wallet. The indictment said the victim paid approximately $448,923 to obtain these digital assets.
“Spoofing” is one of the oldest tricks in the criminal game. “Olahian has adapted this ancient tool for use in a new and evolving arena — cipher space”.
According to the indictment, drawn up by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Oulahyane used paid advertisements on a popular search engine to lure a victim onto the deceptive OpenSea website.
The moment the victim entered the initial phrase on the phishing website, it was taken to an email id controlled by Oulahyane, who immediately accessed the ex’s wallet and transferred the NFTs and cryptocurrency to his wallet. The plaintiffs did not mention the victim’s name or the search engine on which the ad was placed.
Increase in cyber attacks
Spoofing is one of the many social engineering techniques where cybercriminals launch a malicious attack by luring and persuading potential victims to click links, reveal passwords, download attachments, etc.
In April 2022, he was the owner of BYAC deceived From BAYC #1584, MAYC #13168, and MAYC #13169 – worth $570,000 in a swap deal on the Swap Kiwi platform. The scammer used weak validation and anti-spoofing features in their checkmarks to create fake BAYC NFTS. But they were nothing more than Jpegs.
In October 2022, the BNB chain suffered a security breach and cryptocurrency worth millions of dollars. While the freeze, recovery, and normalization continue, a new spoofing attack causes the network to lose 60 ETH.
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