BAYC Says Discord Briefly Compromised, Tells Users to Avoid Discord for Minting APE NFTs

The official channel of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) on the popular messaging service Discord was hit by a malicious tool that intended to trick users into minting fake non-fungible tokens (NFT) from the popular Bored Ape collection, the company said in a tweet on Friday.

• “Do not mint anything from any Discord right now. A webhook in our Discord was briefly compromised,” BAYC said in a tweet. “We caught it immediately but please know: we are not doing any April Fools stealth mints/airdrops etc.”

• Security researchers said a ticket tool that verifies users and pushes channel-wide notifications was compromised. Clicking on the malicious links that enticed users to mint a limited edition NFT would lead to an illicit script that could steal a user’s NFTs and other wallet information, researchers said.
• Several other NFT-centric Discord servers, such as Doodles, Shamanzs, and Nyoki, that use the same tool saw similar phishing messages, pseudonymous blockchain research ‘zachxbt’ pointed out.

• BAYC’s Discord channel is closed to new members at the time of writing. A single NFT from BAYC’s Mutant Ape collection has been stolen thus far.
• ApeCoin (APE), the token linked to BAYC, fell 8.3% in the past 24 hours amid a broader drop in the crypto market. Bitcoin (BTC) briefly lost support at $45,000, while ether slid as much as 5%.

UPDATE (April 1, 07:36 UTC) : Updates headline, amends reference to Discord in the lead.

UPDATE (April 1, 11:23 UTC): Adds a line on ApeCoin's performance in the last bullet.