Every now and then a story comes along that makes everyone say “What?” in unison, and one of those earlier this year led with a headline saying Seth Green was looking for his stolen ape. It turned out the Family Guy star had not lost a hairy primate, but his Bored Ape NFT, which the actor has been developing a new animated series around. According to the reports last month, an online user going by the names of Mr Cheese and DarkWing84 claimed to have bought the NFT through a legitimate source. Now it seems that Green has been able to recover Bored Ape #8398, but it hasn’t come cheap.
The world of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) is another step up the strange ladder of crypto, with images being sold for huge sums of money after being converted from a regular piece of art, photograph or animation into an NFT. Back in May, it appeared that Green became caught in a phishing scam that let to his online collection of NFTs being hacked, and four of them being stolen. “I bought that ape in July 2021, and have spent the last several months developing and exploiting the IP to make it into the star of this show,” Green told entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuck at a May NFT conference. “Days before he’s set to make his world debut, he’s literally kidnapped.”
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It was later revealed that the NFT had since been purchased by Mr Cheese/DarkWing84 in good faith for $200,000. Now it looks like Green has avoided taking out a lawsuit to settle the issue by seemingly paying almost $300,000. In details reported by Buzzfeed, a transaction of the 165 Ether, valued at around $297,000, was transferred from a wallet owned by Green, and Bored Ape #8398 is now back in an online account. Green confirmed that the NFT “is home.”
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NFT Sales Have Boomed In the Last Year
NFTs are another example of online digital creations that are bought and sold for staggering amounts of cryptocurrencies. Over the last year, the well-known Charlie Bit My Finger video was removed from YouTube after the iconic 2007 viral video was turned into an NFT and sold for over $750,000, while other high-profile NFTs have included images of Harambe the gorilla, Lindsay Lohan’s comeback single, Corey Feldman’s prosthetic Stand by Me ear and many others. In the case of Seth Green though, the image being stolen has proved that it can be a very expensive thing to get wrapped up in.
Green was in the middle of production on his new show featuring his Bored Ape NFT, and had even released a trailer for it. However, when the NFT was stolen, Green had to halt production on the show as without the NFT, he didn’t have a show anymore. While it all seems to have been resolved, at a great expense, things could have turned out much worse for Green if he had not been able to track down and reclaim his character. With online scams not a new thing by any means, this is probably not the last case of this type that will be seen.
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