Scammers Steal Over $40,000 From Ozzy Osbourne's NFT Buyers

British heavy metal legend Ozzy Osbourne recently launched his CryptoBatz NFT collectibles on the Discord NFT marketplace, and since then over 1,300 buyers have been conned out of $40,000 by scammers.

CryptoBatz NFT features a series of 9,666 unique NFT bats. Bats were chosen by Ozzy Osbourne because he bit off the head of a live bat on stage during a concert in Des Moines, Iowa, in the year 1982. The moment became a significant part of pop culture and Ozzy Osbourne's public image.

To commemorate the moment in pop culture history, Ozzy Osbourne and Sutter Systems collaborated to launch the CryptoBatz NFT collectibles on the Ethereum blockchain on Jan. 20.

CryptoBatz were put on sale on the Discord NFT marketplace, and Ozzy Osbourne's official Twitter account tweeted out the news on Dec. 27.

The next day Osbourne, tweeted again, this time with a link to the CryptoBatz Discord server from where interested individuals could buy the NFTs. A similar tweet was posted from CryptoBatz's official Twitter account, which is handled by Sutter Systems.

Two days after the launch of CryptoBatz, Discord allegedly changed the URL of CryptoBatz's official marketplace. But, in what seems like a surprising instance of negligence or ignorance, neither Osbourne nor CryptoBatz updated their previous tweets to point users to the URL of the new marketplace to buy the collectibles from.

Obsourne's tweet from Dec. 28 is still available but it now leads to a dead link on Discord.

Scammers quickly took advantage of the situation and set up a fake Discord server on the old URL. Around 1,330 people became members on the fake server, after reaching there using the old link provided in the tweets by Ozzy Osbourne and CryptoBatz. A total of $41,000 were transfered to the scammers by unsuspecting buyers.

The duped buyers aired their concerns on Twitter and complained about the phishing scam.

In response to the complaints, CryptoBatz deleted their tweet, which had the link to the compromised Discord server. The co-founder of Sutter Systems, who goes by the name 'Jepeggi', blamed Discord for changing the URL. He claimed that neither Ozzy Osbourne nor Sutter Systems were to be blamed for enabling this scam.

Ozzy Osbourne is yet to make any comments on the scam. Discord hasn't publicly commented either.

International Business Times has reached out to Discord for their comments. This article will be updated when a response is received.