An NFT trader named Hanwe Chang has earned 800 ETH, worth nearly $1.5 million, after tricking a bot into buying his NFTs at higher prices.
Writing on the social media platform X this weekend, Hanwe Chang claimed that a bot copied all of its NFT bids on Blur, a new NFT marketplace that has recently overtaken the formerly dominant OpenSea as the leading marketplace by volume.
“Noticed that someone’s bot was copying my bids on Blur, so I decided to trick him… Made 800 ETH profit thanks toss,” Chang wrote, sharing a screenshot of 12 transactions of NFTs from the Azuki collection that were sold for 50 ETH each.
Azuki is a recently released NFT collection that grossed almost $40 million at launch.
Bids placed on its own NFT sale
The post and screenshot shared by Chang quickly sparked discussions in the NFT community on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, as the most recent transaction of a similar NFT netted just 5 ETH.
On-chain data from Etherscan shows that the 12 NFTs were collected by Chang in an Ethereum wallet and the profits from the trade were sent to a wallet labeled hanwe.eth.
According to X user A-Raving-Ape.eth, it appears Chang placed bids on the NFTs he already owned, knowing that a bot would copy his bids.
As a result, Chang appears to have successfully tricked the bot into buying his NFTs at prices that were hugely inflated by his own bids.
“This is an epic case of [player versus player] in the current NFT trading market,” the user wrote.
Another community member agreed with the general theory of how the trade came about, but warned others that Chang’s tweet about the trade “is going to be the dumbest of all time.”
“Hanwe admits ‘Bid Spoofing’ or ‘Shill Bidding’ – an illegal fraud or wire fraud market activity,” the user wrote.