A hacker has recently plundered the funds from Bill Murray’s NFT auction, which on Thursday raised 119.2 ETH (about $185,000) for charity.
According to Murray’s team and on-chain data from Etherscan, Murray’s personal wallet was emptied out on Thursday around 7:00 p.m. ET. The anonymous hacker also made an attempt to steal the actor’s personal collection of non-fungible tokens.
This shows that not even well-known celebrities are immune to crypto hacks and theft. Bill Murray, however, was fortunate enough to be protected by a wallet security team, keeping the incident from spiralling out of control.
The Murray’s highly expensive JPEGs — which include a Damien Herst NFT, two CryptoPunks, a Pudgy Penguin, a Cool Cat and several Flower Girls — were transferred to a pair of safehouse wallets by the actor’s wallet security team from NFT consultancy Project Venkman team.
Additionally, Project Venkman said to have stopped the hacker’s attempt to take 800 NFTs from the Bill Murray collection that were kept in the wallet, by relocating those NFTs to a safehouse wallet as well. They claimed to have executed a script to automatically transfer the NFTs to safety.
However, they had no such luck when it comes to the funds. A spokesperson confirmed that the 119.2 ETH Murray had donated the day before for a charity auction was stolen by the hacker.
According to Murray’s team, the hacker transferred the stolen funds to a wallet address bound to the crypto exchange Binance and Unionchain.ai. As of now, the hacker’s identity is still unknown.
The marketplace’s spokesperson said that —although the original ETH has been lost — the auction runner-up and Coinbase user Mishap72 has donated 120 ETH (roughly $187,500) to Chive Charities to make up for the loss of the crypto donation.
In an effort to bring the hacker to justice, Murray’s team stated that it has filed a police case and is working together with Chainalysis, a crypto analytics firm.
