Laurent Correia rug pulls $960,000 with his abandoned "Billionaire Dogs" NFT project

December 14, 2021

Laurent Correia rug pulls $960,000 with his abandoned "Billionaire Dogs" NFT project

A bulldog wearing headphones and blowing a piece of bubble gum, wearing a white shirt with a silver chain collar

Laurent Correia, a French influencer and the creator of "Billionaire Tips" sports betting app, launched an NFT project called "Billionaire Dogs" in December. Promising perks including large cash giveaways and rare NFTs that would also grant luxury cars to their owners, the project launched on December 12. Buyers were invited to purchase NFTs for 0.1 ETH (~$400) in the presale, or 0.2 ETH (~$800) in the public sale.

The project had an underwhelming reception, and the team quickly decided to reduce the supply of available NFTs from 6,500 to 2,000. Two days after launch, the funds were transferred out of the project wallet and to various addresses, including $400,000 which went to Correia. The project also deleted their website, Discord, and Twitter account that week.

Correia, for his part, has continued to post on his "Laurent BILLIONAIRE" Instagram account, where he shows off his private jet and tropical vacations with no mention of the Billionaire Dogs Club. His "NFT" Instagram story shows his pricey NFT purchases beginning on January 14.

Tweet thread by zachxbt

December 14, 2021

A hacker racks up a $45,000 AWS bill for their victim, only to generate $800 worth of Monero

A tweet from Jonny Platt (@jonnyplatt): "Excited to announce I just received my Christmas present from @awscloud! Horrified to see it's $45,000 in charges due to some scammer hacking my account + mining Crypto for the last few weeks Had no sleep last night. It's now 23 hrs since my support ticket & no reply."

Tweet by the owner of the hacked AWS account (attribution)

A hacker gained access to someone's Amazon Web Services account and used it to spin up servers to run Monero miners, ultimately netting 6 Monero (XMR) worth a total of about $800 over the couple of weeks they were running. All this work, however, cost the hacked individual about $45,000 in AWS fees, providing a particularly salient example of why people don't typically use AWS to mine crypto. Fortunately, Amazon waived the bill for the owner of the compromised account.

"$45,000 AWS Crypto-Mining Hack Generates $800 of Monero", Tom's Hardware
Tweet thread by jonnyplatt

December 14, 2021

Bug in major cryptocurrency trackers shows wildly inaccurate data

A graph of Bitcoin price showing an enormous, brief spike

Bitcoin price on CoinMarketCap (attribution)

Some people were briefly elated or devastated when they looked at Coinbase or CoinMarketCap, both major cryptocurrency trackers. A glitch caused some cryptocurrency investments to appear to have surged in value by millions or billions of percentage points; others saw their investments appear to tank to nearly nothing. Some DeFi projects relying on data from Coinbase halted trading, and erroneous data from the glitch persisted into the following day. CoinMarketCap made light of the glitch on Twitter, writing, "How did it feel to be a trillionaire for a couple hours? 😂" Hopefully no one quit their job based on their mistaken windfall! At least one person speculated that bots relying on APIs from these services may have traded on the "market movement", and one project relying on their data reported losing around €300,000 (about $340,000) due to the relative value of their assets being inaccurate.

December 14, 2021

Fans are outraged when the Twitter account of now-deceased Stan Lee shills an NFT

An illustration of Stan Lee wearing a blue superhero costume and sunglasses

One of the NFTs (attribution)

Stan Lee fans were outraged when the Twitter account belonging to Lee, who died in 2018, posted a message to promote an upcoming NFT based on one of his characters. Fans fairly universally felt this was disrespectful to Lee's legacy and contrary to the values he'd held through his career.

December 13, 2021

Artist Loish searches her name on OpenSea and finds 132 NFTs created from her artwork without permission

Digital artist Loish discovered more than one hundred instances where people had created NFTs from her art without her permission, and had to spend hours reporting each individual NFT as copyright violations. She wrote on Twitter, "NFTs are supposedly about authenticity but these platforms (that's you, @opensea) do less than the bare minimum when it comes to making sure that the images are being uploaded by their ORIGINAL CREATORS."

Tweet thread by Loish

December 13, 2021

A collection of NFTs seeks to profit off the murder of George Floyd, with no apparent connection to or approval from his family

Someone released a collection of poorly-made pixel art NFTs depicting the late George Floyd, whose murder by a police officer in May 2020 set off protests around the world. There was no apparent link to his family or any social justice charity; this was just a scam to make money off of the memory of a murder victim. One entry in the collection depicted Floyd as a police officer; another styled him as a Despicable Me minion. "To the people who think I'm super-racist, I would say I'm just an opportunist", said the creator.

"The latest horrible NFT project co-opts George Floyd’s image", Input

December 13, 2021

Vulcan Forged users lose a collective $135 million in hack

(attribution)

Stolen private keys from the blockchain gaming platform Vulcan Forged enabled attackers to siphon funds out of just shy of 100 user wallets. Rather than users managing their own private keys, this is done by the platform, suggesting the issue was not user error. The project says it plans to reimburse users.

December 13, 2021

The Seattle Kraken NHL team, whose home stadium is named the Climate Pledge Arena, raise eyebrows with an NFT release

(attribution)

The Seattle Kraken announced that they would be releasing a set of NFTs. Although several sports groups have released NFTs, people were particularly surprised to see it coming from a team that is known for its environmental advocacy. Though the NFT release will be on a proof-of-stake blockchain that claims to be net-zero emissions (Avalanche), many were up in arms about the team engaging in something that they see as antithetical to environmentalism.

"Kraken to release NFTs, drawing questions about true commitment to environment", Yahoo! Sports

December 13, 2021

Typing error costs NFT trader nearly $300,000

An illustration of a robotic ape with Xs for eyes, over a teal background

Bored Ape #3547 (attribution)

An NFT trader made a typing error when entering a listing price, accidentally listing his Bored Ape NFT for 0.75 ETH (about $3,000) instead of 75 ETH (about $300,000). The NFT was instantly bought by a bot account. The BBC writes, "In traditional banking transactions, such errors are usually reversed easily if the bank facilitating them is told about the mistake quickly. But in the unregulated crypto-trading market, there is usually no way to reverse such a sale."

December 11, 2021

Fable creator Peter Molyneux announces an NFT game where you run a company town

(attribution)

Peter Molyneux announced a new game, Legacy, a business management simulator (fun!) where you join by buying an NFT called "Land", and compete to increase your "LegacyCoin" bank account balance. The company in the game effectively is running a company town, a real-world model with a history that is far more fraught than Molyneux acknowledges in his Verge interview.