Soufiane Oulahyane, a Moroccan citizen, has been charged by the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York for allegedly creating an OpenSea lookalike to gain unauthorized access to cryptocurrency and NFTs.
The charges center on a scheme known as “spoofing,” a form of fraud in which the perpetrator creates a lookalike of a trusted website to steal user credentials. According to the indictment, Oulahyane meticulously made a fraudulent copy of the popular NFT marketplace and then used paid advertising to make his fake site appear first in search results for “OpenSea.” When the user entered his credentials on the deceptive platform, his credentials were sent to an email account controlled by Oulahyane.
The plan was said to have unfolded in September 2021 and resulted in significant theft. The primary victim, an NFT owner based in Manhattan, unknowingly handed over his seed phrase — a string of words that govern access to a cryptocurrency wallet — to the spoofed site. Oulahyane allegedly used this phrase to transfer the contents of the victim’s wallet to herself and sell 39 NFTs, including a Bored Ape that the victim purchased for approximately 49 ETH.
The indictment further details how Oulahyane allegedly sold a Meebit and a Bored Ape Kennel Club NFT from the victim’s purse. The victim originally purchased these NFTs for 9.88 ETH and 6 ETH respectively. Oulahyane allegedly sold the stolen NFTs on the legitimate OpenSea marketplace and then transferred the fraudulent cryptocurrency proceeds to a wallet beyond the victim’s control, bringing the total value of the stolen digital collectibles to approximately $450,000.
Oulahyane is currently imprisoned in Morocco, where he is charged with wire fraud and using an unauthorized access device for serious identity theft. If found guilty, he could face up to 47 years in prison.
Editor’s Note: This article was written by an nft now contributor in collaboration with OpenAI’s GPT-4.
