- A Moroccan who operated an OpenSea clone site stole $450,000 worth of crypto and NFTs
- Soufiane Oulahyane imitated the famous site and paid for Google adverts
- A victim signed into the site and had the contents of his wallet stolen
A Moroccan man named Soufiane Oulahyane has been accused by the Department of Justice of stealing $450,000 in NFTs and cryptocurrency after developing a counterfeit version of the popular online marketplace OpenSea. The 25-year-old suspect allegedly engaged in a scheme where he paid for advertisements that positioned his fraudulent OpenSea platform at the top of search engine results for the term “OpenSea.” By doing so, he enticed individuals to visit the counterfeit website and convinced them to disclose the access keys to their private cryptocurrency wallets.
Oulahyane Paid for Google Adverts
Around September 26, 2021, an individual based in Manhattan, referred to in the DoJ filing as “Victim-1,” fell for the trap after finding the fake site through a Google search. Mistakenly believing it was the legitimate OpenSea website, Victim-1 entered their cryptocurrency wallet’s seed phrase. Unbeknownst to Victim-1, this action inadvertently shared their seed phrase with Oulahyane, granting access to Victim-1’s cryptocurrency wallet.
Oulahyane instantly utilized Victim-1’s seed phrase to gain unauthorized entry into the wallet, transferring the cryptocurrency from Victim-1’s wallet to his own before stealing approximately 39 of Victim-1’s NFTs on the OpenSea marketplace. The value of the haul today is worth some $450,000 but in a bull market this figure would have been, and could again, be in the many millions of dollars.
Use Bookmarks or Memory
Oulahyane faces multiple charges including wire fraud, which can lead to a maximum prison sentence of 20 years; the use of an unauthorized access device, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison; engaging in transactions with an access device to acquire something valued at $1,000 or more, which could result in a maximum sentence of 15 years; and aggravated identity theft, which carries a mandatory consecutive sentence of two years in prison.
The story is a reminder to bookmark the links to the crypto/NFT sites you commonly use or manually type them in each time from memory rather than performing Google searches each time.
