Greetings from San Diego! I’ll be speaking at the Crypto Business Conference later today and go over some case studies inspired by the content I’ve written 😉
I’m excited to educate, inform, and arm the audience with frameworks, examples, and use cases of NFTs and Web3 in a visual and spoken format!
TPan can do more than write?! Ya I know, surprising.
On Saturday morning, there was a trending project on Opensea that caught my eye.
This Marvel?!
I had to check out the collection, this could be big. Why was no one talking about it?!
The art on the collection page was nice, we see some of the biggest faces in the Marvel Universe, Thor and Iron Man. My interest was piqued and continued to dig further.
Looking at the listed NFTs from the collection I see Moon Night, Rogue, Captain Marvel, and what I presumed to be other characters. Nice.
Things still seemed to check out, but my gut told me something was off. If this was a licensed Marvel collection with 215 items, why was the floor so low? I decided to take a look at the sales activity of this collection to see who was buying and selling.
I would imagine a large brand name like Marvel would command much more volume, so I took a look at the profiles of some of the buyers.
‘NFTee’ is spelled in a specific way
All the buyer accounts were created in October 2022
These accounts only hold NFTs from this collection
At this point I was convinced it was a scam, but being my curious self I continued to poke around.
Looking back at the collection page I noticed that there were no secondary royalties. That doesn’t make sense, especially if this was truly a Marvel licensed product. Secondary royalties are typically 5-10%.
Lastly I decided to check out the website.
It was simple…too simple. No additional details, just a modal to ‘register’ and connect your wallet.
Again, curiosity got the better of me and decided to connect my wallet to see what would happen (don’t do this lol).
If curiosity killed the cat, curiosity scammed the TPan 🙁
A Revoke.Cash popup showed up.
The Revoke Cash browser extension helps users to better understand what what transactions they are approving. In the case of the Marvel Duel website, the browser extension was indicating that by signing the allowance, I would be listing NFTs and transferring my ETH while receive nothing in return.
Scam confirmed. Considering the fact that this project was on Opensea’s homepage, I figured it’d be worth tweeting out in case anyone else got excited about the Marvel collection.
Fortunately, it seems like Opensea removed the project, but I hope there will be more ways to flag, identify, and block scams more quickly.
Some factors I would consider to help Opensea and other marketplaces identify scams more quickly:
How many links the project has: Marvel Metaverse only had the smart contract and website on their collection page.
Reputable projects normally have more links, take Cool Cats’ for example.
Creator Royalty fees: It’s rare for reputable projects to have a 0% royalty fee. Those that have 0% royalty should be looked at more closely.
Deeper understanding of the buyers/sellers: If a large portion of the buyers are newly created accounts and aren’t holding any other NFTs, that’s a flag.
Website: The website does not provide much info, and if you connect there are malicious actions the website tries to take.
Centralization vs. Decentralization is a controversial topic at times, and I understand both sides of the argument. However when it comes to safety for a broader consumer base, I believe there should be processes that shut down bad actors swiftly.
See you tomorrow, expect a Crypto Business Conference ‘Precap’ tomorrow 🙂
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