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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge When a pop-cultural icon like Ozzy Osbourne announces an NFT collection, you can count on the project getting publicity. The launch of the “CryptoBatz” collection, a series of 9,666 digital bats, received coverage in outlets like Billboard, Rolling Stone, NME, Hypebeast, and Business Insider, among others.But just two days after the tokens were minted, supporters are being targeted by a phishing scam that drains cryptocurrency from their wallets, playing off a bad link shared by the project’s official Twitter account.Like the majority of NFT projects, CryptoBatz uses Discord as a place to organize its community. The official CryptoBatz Discord is now accessed through the short link discord.gg/cryptobatz. But previously, the project used a slightly different vanity URL at discord.gg/cryptobatznft.When the project switched to the new URL, scammers set up a fake Discord server at the old one. But neither CryptoBatz nor Ozzy Osbourne took the precaution of deleting tweets referencing the previous URL, meaning that old tweets from Osbourne himself were left directing followers to a server now controlled by scammers. One tweet from CryptoBatz, posted on December 31st, 2021, received more than 4,000 retweets and hundreds of replies. The tweet was only removed on January 21st after CryptoBatz was contacted by The Verge. On clicking the scam link, the invite panel for the fake Discord showed the total number of members as 1,330, an indication of the number of people who could potentially have been fooled by the scam.Inside the server, a bot spoofing community management service Collab Land asked users to verify their crypto assets to participate in the server — but directed users to a phishing site where they were prompted to connect their cryptocurrency wallets.A representative of Collab Land declined to comment. Tim Silman, a nonprofit employee, is one person who lost money through the scam. Silman estimates that around $300–400 in ETH was drained from his wallet after he visited the fake Discord server through a link posted on the CryptoBatz website.“I’ve seen at least a dozen people on Twitter voicing this same issue,” Silman told The Verge. “If you look at the transactions on Etherscan, others lost a lot more than me.”An Ethereum wallet address Silman indicated was linked to the scammers had received a series of incoming transactions totaling 14.6 ETH ($40,895) on January 20th and sent it onwards to a wallet containing more than $150,000.The project had been slow to remove the bad links, even when informed, Silman said.“I tagged them a few times in various tweets, as have a few other people, but no response,” he said. “This is an expensive lesson, I suppose.”Even as the fake link remained present in a prominent tweet, the CryptoBatz project continued to hype the public token mint. As of January 21st, CryptoBatz NFTs were being resold on OpenSea for around 1.8 ETH ($5,046).“This is an expensive lesson I suppose”Asked whether the project should accept responsibility for leaving the old link online, Sutter Systems, developers of the CryptoBatz NFT, laid blame for the scam squarely with Discord. In an email statement to The Verge, Sutter Systems co-founder “Jepeggi” emphasized that the compromise was only possible because of the easy setup and maintenance of the scam Discord instance.“Although we feel very sorry for the people that have fallen prey to these scams, we cannot take responsibility for the actions of scammers exploiting Discord — a platform that we have absolutely no control over,” Jepeggi said. “In our opinion this situation and hundreds of others that have taken place across other projects in the NFT space could have easily been prevented if Discord just had a better response/support/fraud team in place to help big projects like ours.”Discord said that it was aware of the incident and in contact with the affected team.“Our Trust & Safety team is in touch with the server owners and are investigating the incident,” said Peter Day, senior manager for corporate communications at Discord. “Our team takes action when we become aware of attacks like this one, including banning users and shutting down servers.”

Order books are closed. If you want a 2022 BRZ, you'll need to find one at your local dealer.

Most anyone who’s moved to a new apartment has had the same experience: whatever broadband provider everyone else in the building has, you have. This kind of lock-in could become less common if a new proposal from the FCC is adopted, preventing revenue-sharing between providers and building owners and opening the door to competitors. It’s […]

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Birds chirp and wind rustles through leaves—the sounds of early fall.“Man, it’s beautiful out here,” remarks a deep, crackly male voice. “All the trees, the green. The leaves are just starting to turn colors.“What are you looking at me like that for?” he continues, chuckling. “No, I know that look. You are up to something naughty.“Whoa, whoa, hang on,” he says with mock resignation. “There are people over by the edge of the lake. You don’t think they’re going to see us?”The birds continue to sing. Leaves crinkle.“Wow, OK.” The voice deepens. “If you want to.”I hit pause on this audio narration and take a deep breath, glancing over at my officemates in The Information’s New York newsroom. I hope nobody can see me blushing, as I stream the audio clip “On the Lake” on Quinn, the three-year-old audio erotica app founded by Caroline Spiegel, a 24-year-old Stanford University dropout and the younger sister of Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel.The mystery man I’m listening to goes by the name of Bad Influence, and he is one of Quinn’s most popular creators. In real life, B.I., as I’ll call him, lives in Brooklyn, working behind the camera in the (traditional) film industry. He stumbled across the world of audio porn through an open casting call, and is now one of Quinn’s most popular creators. His top episode, a 10-minute steamy reunion called “Rough Return,” has been played over 33,000 times.While some of B.I.’s relatives and close friends know about his career as an audio porn performer, he prefers to keep an air of mystery around his actual identity. “I think that sometimes it’s better for my listeners to imagine me exactly how they’d like,” he says.

This is Parentverse, The Information Weekend’s advice column for tech-savvy parents. Email us your questions at parentverse@theinformation.com. Or, if you don’t mind sharing them with your fellow subscribers, post them in the comments below.Dear Parentverse: My 8-year-old loves the game Animal Crossing, and she keeps pestering me about getting her these cards that unlock characters in the game. I have no idea what she is talking about, and when I Googled, all I found were links to something called amiibos that seem like non-fungible tokens for kids. I honestly don’t know what to think. What is an amiibo card, and is it something I should worry about her playing with? Is she trying to become an NFT collector?—Feeling Old in Connecticut

TJ Keasal has been dressing up her videogame characters in new-release Nikes and Adidas since she was in middle school. Long before Fortnite let players outfit their avatars, Keasal, a 32-year-old Michigan native, would win tokens in games like NBA Live and use them to upgrade her players’ on-court style with whatever was hottest at the time, be it Air Jordan 11s or Kobe Bryant Crazy 8s.So when she started seeing chatter on sneakerhead Twitter that people were buying sneaker non-fungible tokens and displaying them as profile pictures on their social media pages, a sense of familiarity kicked in. “Back in the day, we didn’t think of them as NFTs,” said Keasal, who doles out advice on how to build a sneaker collection to her 28,000 YouTube subscribers. But “if we’re into these brands in real life, we’re going to be into them in Web3.”That is the theory, at least, behind major shoe brands’ recent moves into the metaverse. Last month, Nike acquired RTFKT, which creates, sells and stores virtual goods, for an undisclosed sum. Four days later, Adidas dropped 30,000 NFTs in a four-way collaboration with crypto stars Bored Ape Yacht Club, Punks Comic and Gmoney. The NFTs featured avatars of each collaborator decked out in Adidas apparel and the brand’s original shell-toe Superstars. This month, sneaker resale site StockX announced its own digital goods marketplace, Vault NFTs, which lets users buy a digital version of a limited edition sneaker (although there is heated debate on sneaker sites about how these transactions will actually work).