Investors Spent Millions on 'Evolved Apes' NFTs. Then They Got Scammed

[joniboini]

This scams could be make NFT's image looks bad, even though there are so much potential for developing NFT systems.

Just like ICO, IEO and the rest. Anything can be used to scam people, but sometimes things get blown out of proportion and cause a dead end. Sooner or later regulatory compliance will be necessary for this NFT stuff and if that happens, I bet there will be new things to fomo for. That's just the cycle of this market. The one who can last till the end is usually the winner, or just have a very good community to support them. Let's see where NFT go.

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[Wexnident]

We could simply sit back, relax and laugh at the stupid idiots who throw their money at this. But what do we achieve?

A good laugh maybe? There are tens of projects like these each day that pop up and leave after sucking their customers off, nothing really new. Heck, in the first place I'd reckon it's to be expected that stuff like these would naturally come out, the NFT scene is full of hype right now that people would jump up on every new project they would probably see just because it's an "NFT", without even bothering on properly studying the project itself. Not that I mind tbh, it's they're money they're throwing around after all.

[rugrats]

NFT Marketplace is dedicated to gaming and art connoisseurs. I don't know the percentage of NFT clients that fit the market criteria and those who don't understand it are very easily fooled. I do not follow the development of the NFT market after the initial hype because what NFT created such a strong wave made me think the opposite of what the project hyped and then evaporated. And they disappeared after taking all investors' money, about the high risk nature I thought about that so I didn't dare to participate in any NFT projects.

[Cling18]

Focusing on NFTs alone would only lead us to regrets in the future. Yes, there are reputable NFT projects these days but it's still important that we'll always check on their legitimacy and reputation as well as their foundation. Most scammers are also using NFTs as a platform to scam big investors. I would prefer trusting NFT games that have proven a lot in the long run.

[suzanne5223]

I am an enthusiast of innovative ideas and technology. However, I haven't go deep into the NFT scheme so I don't understand how it works but I am also not surprised if some investors go scammed by buying NFT because the little research I have done about it seems like its impractical as the OP said and the funny part is that most social media influencers are hyping this project.
This is the reason why I am not surprised that scammer sees NFT as a way to scam people these days.

[dunfida]

https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dyem/investors-spent-millions-on-evolved-apes-nfts-then-they-got-scammed

You may be wondering at this point about why I am posting these kinds of news, doesn't everyone know that NFTs are impractical at this point?

And to this, I would like to direct you to this article.

This shit still happens, and it happens every single day.

What is the point of spending your energy convincing people to buy Bitcoin and other cryptos when scam artists divebomb victims every single day?

I will hence post about every single NFT scam that I can find information about until this shit stops.

We could simply sit back, relax and laugh at the stupid idiots who throw their money at this. But what do we achieve?

Always expect that there would be fools that do really believe that it could really be valuable or would really be worth on the amount that they had invested and soon they do realize up things
when they had already been wrekt.

Im not really that a fan of NFT's but we can deny that there are some which did really end up on being valuable and this is why most people been thinking off with those kind of luck and probability
on getting some decent.

Scams? Its so common and nothing to be surprising actually.

[darewaller]

What were they expecting? I mean these Ape stuff got super boring, just because one ape collection got so much attention, doesn't mean that everyone should create some ape stuff that would be super famous and worth money neither, even non-scam ones try to do this.

In any case I believe that if you are trying to mint and get your hands on some brand new Ape NFT because you want to be early and sell that to make a profit because you know they worth nothing to you in value but you want to profit from being early and sell it higher for profit to scam others basically, selling something that has zero value to you but profit from it selling to someone else high is scam after all, then you are a scammer who got scammed and I am not really sad for you, just move on.

[LUCKMCFLY]

Looking at it from the point of view of the NFTs, those who started with NFT were recognized artists, where each one capitalized their money and some were very successful, while there were others who did not, who simply launched it without success, where people hardly won, at one point I thought that NFT was something similar to ICOs in 2017 and there may be arguments to make such a comparison, or such an analogy. What should be noted is that in any project, be it NFT or not, there will always be crooks or thieves who cheat people, we cannot cover the sun with a finger, right now the NFTs in the direction of games are capturing a lot of money and where there is money obviously there are people, this is law, and it is something that if the investigation of the person is not sufficient it is punished with loss of money.

[timerland]

If this stuff is raising $2.7 mil, the NFT space is beyond screwed.

I do see a bright future when it comes to the actual applications of NFTs, for instance, in the field of rewards programs.

But that is definitely NOT what these people in the NFT space is doing right now. All they are doing is flipping jpegs of ape avatars for profit and hoping that the next person along will be willing to purchase it off them for more.

[Silberman]

I have a better title for this:

Evolved Apes turns out to be a Monkey Business!

Obviously, some poeple lost money, maybe some have lost their savings but one has to understand at some point that not every single damn scheme can bring you ridiculous gains overnight, if every single coin or token or scheme or nft or game would do so we would have long run out fo money to prop those prices up.
At this point what's left to hope is not that those scams will stop, not with that amount of money to be gained but that poeple will stop throwing so much money at every random project, or at least they will only put down money that they can afford to lose.
But I know that's wishful thinking probably there are at least a dozen more games like that in the making as we speak.

Unfortunately it is, some people never learn and instead they try chasing that which damaged them with increased energy, after all instead of thinking their decisions to invest in those scams was wrong and it is time to change their approach to the market they still believe their approach was correct, they just happened to pick the wrong project, so now they will look for the project that feels right for them once again not understanding that they will lose whatever money they had left after the first scam.

[teosanru]

https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dyem/investors-spent-millions-on-evolved-apes-nfts-then-they-got-scammed

You may be wondering at this point about why I am posting these kinds of news, doesn't everyone know that NFTs are impractical at this point?

And to this, I would like to direct you to this article.

This shit still happens, and it happens every single day.

What is the point of spending your energy convincing people to buy Bitcoin and other cryptos when scam artists divebomb victims every single day?

I will hence post about every single NFT scam that I can find information about until this shit stops.

We could simply sit back, relax and laugh at the stupid idiots who throw their money at this. But what do we achieve?

I don't understand why are people surprised by this? I am expecting more of this to come very soon. NFT craze has reached a level which is now called stupidity, everyone just coming up with the same idea by applying a new label on the same old shit, all of them claiming to make a community that big and lucrative which no one else has seen until now, in fact few of them are promising to make a metaverse altogether, honestly speaking even if 2% of the total NFT projects do what they have committed in their roadmap I will really be surprised. NFTs are just another get rich quick scheme which is making a few people rich while it's going to make a lot of them poor when the dusts setttle.

[eaLiTy]

This shit still happens, and it happens every single day.
What is the point of spending your energy convincing people to buy Bitcoin and other cryptos when scam artists divebomb victims every single day?

Even if users are getting scammed left and right they will not change. The funny aspect is that the investors are ready to invest in projects that have anonymous developers and they promised to come out with something magical and they vanished with millions of dollars worth of Ethereum.

I will hence post about every single NFT scam that I can find information about until this shit stops.
We could simply sit back, relax and laugh at the stupid idiots who throw their money at this. But what do we achieve?

I hate seeing users getting scammed but what is the best you can do. If you start posting about the scams then you will get a long list of scams to write about .

[ninkdwi]

one of the negative effects of the NFT overhype is that it is getting more and more and indeed something like this will happen when the massive adoption of nft and the enthusiasm that can't be stopped from a few months ago.
and this will damage the image of nft and it's not impossible when things like this continue to happen I think NFT will also be labeled as the creator of the biggest scammers like what ico has experienced a few years ago.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

NFT Marketplace is dedicated to gaming and art connoisseurs.

Oh please.  I don't know about the presence of gamers in the NFT space, but it's hardly a market populated by "art connoisseurs".  It's mostly a bunch of greedy people who want to flip NFTs to the next sucker for a profit, not people who appreciate real art.  Just search on Youtube for anything related to NFTs and the only results you'll get are about how hot the market is--and absolutely nothing about the quality of the art.  That alone should tell you something.

I don't understand why are people surprised by this? I am expecting more of this to come very soon. NFT craze has reached a level which is now called stupidity, everyone just coming up with the same idea by applying a new label on the same old shit<snip run-on sentence>

Lol.  It's definitely in the stupidity phase, if there is such a thing.  Lots of people are apparently making bundles of money from this crap, but that's exactly what NFTs are: Crap.  This is the closest thing to the tulip bubble I've ever seen.  You know what happened to all the Dutch people when they realized they'd gone out of their minds speculating on bulb variants and whatnot, right?  The market crashed to as close to zero as you can get.  If the NFT hysteria lasts for more than a year, I'll be very surprised.

[uneng]

NFT Marketplace is dedicated to gaming and art connoisseurs.

Oh please.  I don't know about the presence of gamers in the NFT space, but it's hardly a market populated by "art connoisseurs".  It's mostly a bunch of greedy people who want to flip NFTs to the next sucker for a profit, not people who appreciate real art.  Just search on Youtube for anything related to NFTs and the only results you'll get are about how hot the market is--and absolutely nothing about the quality of the art.  That alone should tell you something.

Not every NFT related projects are ran by scammers. There are many people putting their effort into creating real, quality products for customers. As an example I can mention Lost Relics game. You can search about it on youtube or join their discord channel and you will see it's not a greedy attempt from the developer to sell worthless virtual data to foolish players around.

Indeed it's not refined classic art admired by specialists, but it's a real project anyway, created by just one developer so far (since 2018). And step by step his project is enchanting many people who enjoy online mmorpg games.

About this Evolved Apes project in particular, it looks like the "developer" had bad intentions since the beginning and used NFTs' hype to execute his shady plan, but now the fan base says they will continue running the project without him. There are bad people in every places, however we can't condemn the whole sector because some bad elements.

[jaysabi]

From the article:

...there were multiple red flags but 99% of us were just blinded by the art and the promises and the potential profits we assumed would come.

To be fair, that's pretty much 99% of the crypto community now in all things crypto.  No reasonable expectations of what is probable because they're just blinded by the potential profits they assume will come.  Also, the article ends with the "do your own research" warning, but that's not really helpful to a community that's dominated by people who suck at researching things and thinking critically about what they find.

[CaptainCrapper]

https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dyem/investors-spent-millions-on-evolved-apes-nfts-then-they-got-scammed

You may be wondering at this point about why I am posting these kinds of news, doesn't everyone know that NFTs are impractical at this point?

And to this, I would like to direct you to this article.

This shit still happens, and it happens every single day.

What is the point of spending your energy convincing people to buy Bitcoin and other cryptos when scam artists divebomb victims every single day?

I will hence post about every single NFT scam that I can find information about until this shit stops.

We could simply sit back, relax and laugh at the stupid idiots who throw their money at this. But what do we achieve?

I can't get a good logic for an NFT investment Millions of capital yes I agree to invest there but not it lots of I don't agree. There are lots of scammers are involved if if NFT Team scams how can you justify this. I think there is no white paper to justify proper tem.

[FinneysTrueVision]

The artwork doesn't even look very good. This was just a lazy copycat project that ripped off the more popular ape-themed NFTs. Unfortunately, these kinds of scams will give ammunition to people like Elizabeth Warren who are looking for any excuse to attack crypto.

[amishmanish]

NFT Marketplace is dedicated to gaming and art connoisseurs.

Oh please.  I don't know about the presence of gamers in the NFT space, but it's hardly a market populated by "art connoisseurs".  It's mostly a bunch of greedy people who want to flip NFTs to the next sucker for a profit, not people who appreciate real art.  Just search on Youtube for anything related to NFTs and the only results you'll get are about how hot the market is--and absolutely nothing about the quality of the art.  That alone should tell you something.

Not every NFT related projects are ran by scammers. There are many people putting their effort into creating real, quality products for customers. As an example I can mention Lost Relics game. You can search about it on youtube or join their discord channel and you will see it's not a greedy attempt from the developer to sell worthless virtual data to foolish players around.

If you are talking about Lost Relics on Enjin then I too have known this from around 2018. Did play the game a few times but it was too simplistic to be enjoyable. The developers still have the NFT functionality built in where any in-game items you win will appear in your blockchain wallet. Its just that the games themselves aren't refined enough to have this economy make much of a difference.

While I'd prefer that these working projects reach scale and find lot of players, the reality is that till a real game studio comes on the scene, single developers and small teams simply cannot deliver the same level of art and game mechanics. When the big studios decide to pivot to blockchain, these games will simply stop getting supported as the developers will be hired by the established studios. This is what has been happening forever and that is the reason that people just want to make a quick profit as soon as possible. The "Flippers" are at the bottom of the food chain. The real predators are the people like those behind "Evolved Apes". The ones who realize that it is easy to create hype in this space and decide to simply scam people out of their money.

[cheezcarls]

Only invest what you can afford to lose and make sure that you are financially stable and don’t go all-in. This is what I’ve been doing so far. I have invested into NFTs (e.g., collectibles and play to earn NFTs) and already treating it as “dead money”. Until now I have yet to sell a single NFT. We should be prepared emotionally and once you deposited that money into NFT, accept the fact that you’re gonna lose it.