OpenSea Sued For 1 Million Dollars By User Who Lost His Bored Ape NFT

The OpenSea drama continues to stir up controversy, and although many NFT owners took their massive losses, one of the victims had enough and decided to take his case to court.

Timothy McKimmy, an NFT collector, sued the NFT marketplace OpenSea after losing his Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT due to what he described as a malicious attack on the platform.

How Thimothy McKimmy lost his Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT

As explained by Thimothy McKimmy – who goes by the nickname McKimmy on OpenSea – in or around February 7, 2022, a hacker exploited a security vulnerability to illegally access his wallet and sell his Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT to a third party for 0.01 WETH.

Taking into account the price of Ether as of February 21, 2022, the selling price McKimmy’s NFT would be around $25.73, which is virtually the equivalent of giving away the token considering that the price floor for the collection is 91.9 ETH, according to OpenSea’s data.

Because NFTs are unique tokens, there is no way to determine a price for all of the tokens in the same way that the value of fungible tokens such as ETH or BTC is determined. The price floor exists to denote the minimum price that sellers are willing to accept for their tokens at a given point in time. In other words, the cheapest Bored Ape currently costs 91.9 ETH or $236K. Ouch!

In fact, right now, McKimmy’s lost Ape is now for sale for 225 ETH, or $607K on OpenSea, and as McKimmy says in his lawsuit, the current owner has refused to give him back his Ape.

McKimmy’s Bored Ape Yatch CLub NFT is being sold for 225ETH in Opensea. Image: Opensea

OpenSea and the Phishing Attacks

As Cryptopotato previously reported, a few days ago, a group of OpenSea users began reporting that they had lost their tokens after falling victim to a massive phishing attack.

The attacker took advantage of a critical moment to launch his scam. OpenSea was updating its smart contract precisely to protect users from previous malicious practices. To perform the update, OpenSea sends official emails to its users, asking them to authorize the execution of the new contract.

Apparently, the attacker took the opportunity to trick some users into signing a malicious code that gave him control of their wallets, and that’s how McKimmy’s precious Ape changed hands for 20 bucks.

McKimmy argues that OpenSea “(failed) to implement policies and procedures to prevent, identify, detect, respond to, mitigate, contain, and/or correct security violations,” and is demanding payment for “the valuation of the Bored Ape, and/or monetary damages over $1,000,000.”