- Robbie Acres, an NFT collector, has sued leading NFT marketplace OpenSea for holding his assets against his will
- Acres was scammed off his digital collectibles and blames the marketplace for failing to respond on time
- The collector estimates the OpenSea-induced loss to be around $500,000
Robbie Acres, an NFT collector has sued leading NFT marketplace OpenSea for allegedly holding his digital collectibles against his will. Acres claims that he was scammed and reported it to the marketplace shortly after it happened but OpenSea took over two days to respond and when they did they prevented him from accessing his account for over 90 days.
Slow Response Caused $500K in Losses
Speaking to Cointelegraph, the collector said that OpenSea’s failure to offer a timely response gave the scammer ample time to resell the stolen collectibles for a lower price. He further disclosed that the marketplace resulted in locking his account consequently holding his “assets ransom” considering he didn’t request OpenSea to disable his account.
Acres also claimed that the marketplace asked him to deliberately make a misrepresentation under oath for him to be granted access back to his account. According to Acres, the marketplace’s behavior led to losses amounting to $500K and it should be held responsible, causing the collector to engage lawyers led by Enrico Schaefer.
OpenSea can Choose to Ignore the Issues
Schaefer noted that Acres’ predicament is a common occurrence in the NFT marketplace. The lawyer added that OpenSea doesn’t have a standard way to deal with such issues and sometimes chooses to “simply ignore the issues” while at other times it accepts its mistakes.
Although OpenSea has admitted to being aware of Acres’ issue, it maintained that the collector’s digital artworks were stolen “outside” the marketplace and resold before the theft report was received.
Acres’ loss comes a day after Moonbirds creator lost NFTs worth over $1 million to a phishing scam and two weeks after an NFT influencer lost his entire NFT stash through a similar scheme, a sign that malicious actors are more into phishing scams rather than directly hacking a collector’s NFT wallet.
