The U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York announced the unsealing of charges against Soufiane Oulahyane, who they allege created a lookalike OpenSea website to trick victims into entering their login details, and used sponsored links in a “popular internet search engine” to cause his site to show up as the first result when a person searched “opensea”. A victim with the OpenSea name “Hank666” entered his credentials into the scam website on September 26, 2021, and Oulahyane quickly used the credentials to transfer his crypto assets, sell his NFTs, and transfer the proceeds of those sales to his own wallet. Altogether, Hank666 lost assets that he had paid around $449,000 to obtain.
Oulahyane is charged with wire fraud, two counts of access device fraud, and aggravated identity theft.
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“Press release: Defendant Charged With Theft Of Cryptocurrency And NFTs Through Spoofing Of OpenSea Marketplace”
U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York -
United States of America v. Soufiane Oulahyane
