An NFT trader that goes by the name Hanwe Chang has made 800 ETH, worth almost $1.5 million, after tricking a bot into buying his NFTs at elevated prices.
Writing on the social media platform X on this weekend, Hanwe Chang claimed that a bot was copying all of his NFT bids on Blur, a new NFT marketplace that has recently overtaken the previously dominant OpenSea as the top marketplace by volume.
“Noticed that someone’s bot was copying my bids on Blur, so I decided to trick him… Made 800 ETH profit thanksss,” Chang wrote, while sharing a screenshot of 12 transactions of NFTs from the Azuki collection that were sold for 50 ETH each.
Azuki is a recently released NFT collection that raised near $40 million during its launch.
Placed bids on his own NFT sale
The post and screenshot shared by Chang quickly sparked discussions in the NFT community on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, given that the most recent trade of a similar NFT brought in only 5 ETH.
On-chain data from Etherscan shows that the 12 NFTs were gathered by Chang in an Ethereum wallet, and that profits from the trade were sent to a wallet labelled as hanwe.eth.
According to X user A-Raving-Ape.eth, what appears to have happened is that Chang has placed bids on the NFTs he already owned, known that a bot would copy his bids.
As a result, Chang appears to have successfully tricked the bot to buy his NFTs at prices that were massively inflated by his own bidding.
“This is an epic case of [player versus player] in the current NFT trading market,” the user wrote.
Another community member agreed with the overall theory of how the trade was made, but warned others that Chang’s tweet about the trade “will go down as the dumbest of all time.”
“Hanwe admits to ‘Bid Spoofing’ or ‘Shill Bidding’ — an illegal market activity of Fraud or Wire Fraud,” the user wrote.
