Asian pop superstar Jay Chou loses over $450,000 Worth of NFTs to scammer

Asian pop superstar Jay Chou lost over USD450,000 in one of the most valuable non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in a fishing scam.

Jay Chou’s stolen NFT is BAYC #3738, a series from the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection, one of the world’s valuable NFT collection.

Jay Chou confirmed the theft in his Instagram post, he initially thought the theft was an April Fool’s joke, but quickly realizing he no longer had access to his valuable NFTs.

Twitter account of BAYC also said that it did not make any April Fool’s Day joke, confirming the hack.

As of today, BAYC’s floor price cost 109,99 ether, each ether worth USD3509,65, so the cheapest BAYC collection roughly equivalent to USD385,954.

According to Chain Catcher, the information from Opensea, the world’s largest NFT marketplace and Ethscan, the Ethereum blockchain explorer, the NFT stolen from Jay Chou was sold on the LooksRare platform for 130 ether, roughly USD456,170.

Scammers typically take advantage of verified Twitter accounts to run free scams, then use bots to trick people into clicking on links that direct them to a phishing site and steal their NFTs.

A non-fungible token (NFT) is a digital asset that represents real-world objects like art, music, videos, and videos, buyer’s ownership of NFTs recorded on that blockchain, meaning the digital commodities are unique and cannot be exchanged, depreciated and stole. People commonly use eth, the native token of Ethereum, to resell and trade NFTs on trading marketplace such as Opensea.

Jay Chou is among several Asian celebrities who have been deeply embarking on NFTs since last year, including Hong Kong actors Edison Chen and and Singaporean singer JJ Lin.

NFTs present the opportunity for celebrities to sell a piece of IP that can appreciate in value over time and become a cherished item for fans. More and more well-known artists and new stars have become acutely aware of utility behind NFTs since they can interact with fans in in digital world by selling unique, NFT versions of their songs, albums, and artwork. Eventually, those celebrities could cash in some high profits from their NFT sales.

In January, Jay Chou launched a NFT project called PhantomBear through his fashion brand PHANTACi.

The Phanta Bears, a collection of 10,000 algorithmically-generated digital avatars, were quickly sold out in less than 40 minutes on New Year’s Day, racking up a total of CNY62 million.

Like Bored Apes Yacht Club collection, each digital bear has its own unique characteristics that is created by the algorithm and is different in colours, with different clothing and accessories designed by Jay Chou’s PHANTACi.

JJ Lin, who is also well known for his songs and music creation in mainland China, had spent nearly USD1 million on three pieces of virtual land in Decentraland, which is a virtual world based on the Ethereum blockchain.