At first glance, the NFT project Big Daddy Ape Club looked like either a parody or a rip-off of the much more famous Bored Ape Yacht Club, arguably the most successful NFT project in the world. But while Bored Ape has attracted celebrity attention from the likes of Paris Hilton, Jimmy Fallon, and Gwyneth Paltrow, the Big Daddy Ape Club won’t be featured on the Tonight Show anytime soon. At least not for anything good.
As the Twitter account NFT Gurus points out, the scammers behind Big Daddy Ape Club were able to get people to try and “mint” their NFT with a surcharge of 1 Solana, which cost about $135 at the time. The transaction would fail, but the Solana still went through.
The scammers were able to get at least 9,041 people to attempt their mint of the ape knock-offs, meaning they collected over $1.2 million. But as SolRarity notes, this isn’t the scammer’s first rodeo. This is at least the third scam pulled by the person or people behind the Big Daddy Ape Club, based on the wallets where the money was funneled. It’s obviously a profitable venture if you don’t mind being evil.
Strangely, the project was “verified” by Civic, a crypto company that supposedly audits NFT projects. Civic says it’s working with authorities to track down the perpetrators, according to the news outlet Decrypt.
All of the social media accounts for Big Daddy Ape Club have been wiped but you can still see an archived version of the website at the Wayback Machine.
