NFT project creates copy scam

Flying heros on the Solana chain is actually Flybies on the Eth Chain find out how to avoid our mistakes.

We all love a good NFT project. Whenever a new exciting project pops up those that are in the NFT Space ususally get very excited. We wonder about the mint date, the mint price , the community, the utility, and the possibility of future profits. Sometimes we get so hyped about a certain part of the project that we forget to think about the other major parts. That ,unfortunately, is what happened to some unlucky souls on Twitter this week.

 

Flying pile of…


Recently on Twitter a free mint of a 3D project was advertised on Twitter. The project featured cute ghost-like renditions of some of our favorite world characters. There was the Geppetto and Pinnochio ghost, The Darth Vader Ghost, The Goku Ghost, Ruroni Kenshin Ghost, and many many more that were really cool. The art was amazing and there was a promise of a free mint. This enticed many people to get ready. The marketing was indeed done very well and many members were excited ( at the time of this writing there are over 7,000 followers.)

https://foundation.app/@halkat3d/flybies/6

The art was super cute — Like this character that resembles Gandalf the Grey.

 

A cautionary tale

 

A lot of people were really excited about the art and the fact that it was moving , so excited in fact that they failed to notice a lot of the red flags that were showing. To be honest, I myself- someone who reports on NFT projects daily , failed to see them as well. Let us go through them all and hope that this cautionary tale will aid you in your next NFT mint.

1. Licensing– The characters in the project were indeed cute but there was no indication as to whether or not the likenesses were licensed likenesses or if the characters were just made that way without permission( I would find it hard to believe that Disney wouldn’t bring out the above NFT themselves). There were many characters that definitely would need permission granted before being sold,I swear hindsight is a son-of-a-gun.

 

You can’t tell me this wouldn’t be sold by Disney

2.Communication– There were a lot of posts that were on the Twitter that you could not reply to and on the ones where you could reply to a lot of people were warning about the project being shady and probably a scam. Sometimes it’s best to listen to those, it’s not always just FUD. Another issue is the comments on posts that did allow for commenting all seemed very capricious.

3.No Marketplace listed- There was no mention of a marketplace ( not until after they were sold out). Nobody knew anything about secondary at all, or even if there was going to be a secondary market.

4.No Discord– I personally knew this was a red flag but still kept out hope, I mean they did say free mint.

5. Free mint– There were a couple of sayings during my prepubescent years “There is no such thing as a free lunch” and “If it sounds to good to be true , then it is!” A lot of the poor minters like myself should have remembered that at the time of the writing. As a matter of fact during the time of mint it said free but each transaction cost $14. That should have been an indicator something was off, and it was ,but I still ended up buying 4- I promise I will explain why later.

6. Copied Art- in perhaps the most glaring drop of the ball on many of our parts was not realizing this was copied work. The artwork itself is from another project entitled Flybies by a talented artist Halkat 3D.

The real project is on the Eth blockchain and Foundation.app

Now that is all the initial information you should know but what if you were dumb enough to actually hold on to hope that it was still legit , well there is another tell-tale sign and that would be in the NFT itself.

 

 

Did you notice it? Look closer, at the properties. There is nothing there! That in itself should let you know something is off, there is no metadata, there is no information on the nft at all- that is always a red flag.

Now earlier I told you I would explain why after I found all of this out I still continued to buy 3 more. Well, many reasons: 1. I am a reporter and my job is to learn more about the scam to pass on the information to you. 2. I really wanted to see if I could get a Darth Vader. After spending $50 I decided it was more than enough and my stupidity had reached it’s limit.

The weirdest part of this entire ordeal was the fact that after the mint the copied project still managed to be listed on Magic Eden and Solanart for a while, how that happened is anyones guess as currently the two markets have removed the tricky project from their websites

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