Magic Eden to refund users after 25 fake NFTs sold due to exploit

Over a 24-hour period, over two dozen fake NFTs were sold on the Magic Eden marketplace due to a “massive exploit” on the platform.

Magic Eden, a nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace, has promised to refund all users who were duped into purchasing bogus NFTs on its website as a result of an exploit.

In a statement issued on January 4, the company stated that a bug in its newly deployed “activity indexer” for its Snappy Marketplace and Pro Trade tools allowed fake NFTs to bypass verification and appear alongside genuine NFT collections.

Magic Eden stated that the exploit resulted in the sale of 25 fraudulent NFTs across four collections in the last 24 hours, but it is still unclear whether additional NFTs were affected beyond the last day.

The high-priced and popular Solana-based collections ABC and y00ts were two of the affected projects.

According to the NFT platform, the problem has been resolved by temporarily disabling both tools and eliminating the “entry points” that allowed unverified NFTs to pass through.

It also advised users to perform a “hard refresh” to ensure that the unverified listings no longer appeared in their browser session and, as a precaution, to stop purchasing unverified NFTs.

“Magic Eden is safe for trading, and we will refund all users who purchased unverified NFTs by mistake as a result of this issue,” it wrote.

Magic Eden first alerted the public to the fraudulent NFTs in a tweet on January 4, citing community reports that people were able to purchase fake ABC NFTs. It stated at the time that it had added “verification layers” in an attempt to resolve the issue.

Following the announcement, Twitter users continued to raise the alarm about the prevalence of fake y00ts NFTs on the platform. A screenshot from ABC creator “HGE” showed at least two sales of 100 Solana each, for a total of about $2,600.

DeGods, the creator of y00ts, also informed his followers that there was an exploit on Magic Eden that allowed unverified NFTs to be included in the collection.

The latest exploit is the second incident that Magic Eden users have had to deal with this week.

On January 3, the market was strewn with pornographic images and images from the TV show The Big Bang Theory.

Magic Eden stated that a third-party image hosting provider was “compromised,” which resulted in the “unsavory images,” but assured users that their NFTs were safe.