Part of the irresistible charm of Marc-Uwe Kling's children's book "The day grandma broke the internet" is that you don't have to be a senior citizen with little computer affinity to experience a blue miracle after a double click.
Even for users who are familiar with the latest developments on the Internet and who handle blockchain, cryptocurrency or non-fungible tokens, "click, click" in the wrong place can have unexpected consequences.
It doesn't have to be a total shutdown like Kling did - "The whole internet.
Around the world.
Destroyed.
From grandma.” – it's enough if the well-stocked virtual wallet is suddenly empty.
This is what happened, according to Forbes, with netizens who fell for fake news on the previously hacked Twitter account of Mike Winkelmann aka Beeple - the man whose mega sale at Christie's fueled the NFT hype.
Beeple, it was read on Twitter, is cooperating again with the luxury brand Louis Vuitton, and here are two links to NFT works.
Click, click: Instead of acquiring coveted certificates of ownership on the blockchain, the buttons resulted in users losing the equivalent of almost half a million dollars in total as cryptocurrency and NFT were pulled from their wallets.
human vulnerability
Phishing is the name of the scam that had already been used to knit a scam about alleged Banksy NFTs.
The fact that you can trade anonymously and decentrally in the blockchain without intermediaries has its pitfalls.
In the current year alone, the equivalent of around $1.3 billion in crypto assets is said to have been stolen.
The Instagram account of the highly traded NFT collection "Bored Ape Yacht Club" was also hacked in April.
Click, click, tokens for millions were gone;
three cheated collectors are now suing the OpenSea trading platform.
They cannot hope to get their “apes” back: once a transaction has been completed in the blockchain, it cannot be undone.
The link that phishing victims fell for
Ultimately, such cases are not a problem of blockchain technology, say its defenders, but what was called "PEBKAC" in the happy days of stationary computers: "problem exists between keyboard and chair", meaning that people are the weak point here.
By the way, losing money with NFT is also possible thanks to highly volatile crypto courses and without any fraud.
The NFT for Gustav Klimt's "The Kiss", which the Vienna Belvedere issued in February, brought around 4.4 million euros into the museum's coffers - wonderful.
On the buyer side, you can be less sure that you have made a good deal: the price of the tokens has fallen by almost ninety percent since then.
The best strategy for investors is to hold at all costs.
And keep your eyes peeled for the next click-click.