A hacker stole 36 Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) non-fungible tokens, which were all returned after Yuga Labs’ co-founder, Greg Solano, reportedly paid for the bounty. It was reported that the culprit received 120 Ether (ETH) as payment.

According to CoinTelegraph, almost $3 million worth of NFTs were stolen through hacking on Saturday, Dec. 16. The hacker publicly announced his deed by posting an online message saying, “I came here to pick up residual garbage.”

Bounty Request for the Digital Assets

The hacker/s requested a ransom in exchange for the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) non-fungible tokens stolen from the NFT Trader peer-to-peer trading platform. Based on the reports, the bounty was equivalent to $276,000.

The cybercriminal returned all 36 BAYC and 18 MAYC shortly after obtaining the ransom payment. They directly received the cryptocurrency from the Yuga Labs co-founder. The hacker was true to his/her words when he said the NFTs would be returned immediately once the bounty was paid.

Confirmed the Return of the NFTs

The Crypto Times reported that a community effort led by Boring Security, a non-profit group, helped coordinate the bounty payment, which resulted in recovering all the stolen digital assets the past weekend.

“All 36 BAYC and 18 MAYC that the exploiter had are now in our possession,” Boring Security wrote in a social media post on X, formerly Twitter. “We sent her (the hacker) 10% of the floor price of the collections as a bounty.”

Meanwhile, it was said that the hacking originated from a platform upgrade completed 11 days before the incident. The hackers found a loophole that enabled unauthorized NFT transfers because of the previously allowed trading permissions. This was explained by the founder of Delegate, Foobar, who also helped the NFT Trader team stop the cyberattack.

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