At the start of the new year, global NFT sales leapt over the $4 billion mark. Simultaneously, like the stench of a bloated trash bag busting open, talk of scamming in the space spread with gusto: Google searches for “NFT scam” hit an all-time high the week of Jan. 1. With droves of people buying in — some far more tech-savvy than others — Rolling Stone asked experts for tips on how to avoid expensive blunders.
“As more money flows into the metaverse, so do bad actors hoping to extract value at the expense of everyday crypto users,” says Georgio Constantinou, who discovers, builds, and produces crypto projects. “Crypto scams have been getting increasingly more sophisticated, and it emphasizes the caution that people need to exercise in a decentralized ecosystem.” As Constantinou explains, there are various types of scams, and it’s important to know how to identify them in order to avoid them.
Turn off your Discord DMs
According to Greek mythology, the Trojan War started when a goddess, Eris, threw something sparkly — a golden fruit now known as “the apple of discord”— into a party of feasting revelers. Nowadays, a fake link on Discord — the decentralized, online network of chatroom servers — can be similarly enticing and chaos-inciting.
Discord hacks are one of the most common NFT scams out there. They happen when hackers gain administrator-level access to a Discord server and post a fake minting link in the announcements channel. The…
