Five people were formally charged in France on Wednesday with the theft of a “particularly valuable” collection of NFTs, certificates of authenticity linked to digital artworks, the Paris prosecutor’s office told AFP.
There are five young people who, between the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, gained control of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) from the collection known as “Bored Apes”.
The “Bored Apes” are a series of thousands of algorithmically generated versions of a monkey’s face.
Soon after their release in 2021, they became an object of desire among NFT collectors and celebrities such as football player Neymar followed suit.
The five young people created a website through which they contacted the owners of these “Bored Apes” to convince them that they could transform these images into animated works.
But in practice, the site concealed a method of obtaining the security codes of these NFT accounts.
Five victims filed a complaint. One of them suffered the theft of three NFTs, valued at US$ 2.5 million (R$ 13.2 million).
The youths, born between 1998 and 2003, were accused of coup in an organized gang, fraudulent money laundering and criminal association, according to the Public Ministry.
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