French law enforcement took advantage of research conducted by a cryptocurrency analyst under the pseudonym ZachXBT to arrest five suspected NFT scams.
According to Agence France Presse, the five suspects, aged between 25 and 29, created a website that offered to animate static NFT images from the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) collections. If a gullible owner of collection tokens connected his wallet, he lost NFT.
The fraudulent scheme worked from the end of 2021 to the beginning of 2022. Now the suspects are charged with fraud as part of an organized criminal group and concealment of crimes. Prosecutors asked the court to detain two suspects who are believed to be the leaders of the group.
Interestingly, for the arrest, the police used the data of an anonymous cryptocurrency analyst ZachXBT, who conducted an investigation after “requests from the BAYC token holder community.” A message appeared on the ZachXBT account that he was very happy with the arrest of the criminals.
“The scammers tried to cover their tracks using the Tornado Cash mixer. However, they were not too careful when withdrawing funds from the mixer,” the analyst wrote.
In mid-September, ZachXBT reported that hackers stole almost $3.3 million from Ethereum users who created human-readable addresses using the Profanity service.
Source: Bits
I am an experienced journalist, writer, and editor with a passion for finance and business news. I have been working in the journalism field for over 6 years, covering a variety of topics from finance to technology. As an author at World Stock Market, I specialize in finance business-related topics.
