Ozzy Osbourne rose to fame as the lead singer of the heavy metal band Black Sabbath in the 1970s. Osbourne was fired from Black Sabbath in 1979 because of drinking and drug issues, yet he went on to have a successful solo career. Recently, the “Crazy Train” singer‘s CryptoBatz NFTs were targeted by a scam that cheated users of thousands of dollars.

Ozzy Osbourne introduced his new CryptoBatz NFT collection a few weeks ago, offering 9,666 unique digital bat designs to anyone ready to part with their cryptocurrency. It has now been revealed that a huge number of people were duped out of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency as a result of a faulty link posted by the project’s official Twitter account and website.

According to the tech site The Verge, Cryptobatz conducted its transactions on the site Discord and initially used the shot URL “discord.gg/cryptobatznft” (do NOT click) in its Twitter postings. The official short link was changed somewhere along the way to discord.gg/cryptobatz, but hackers took advantage of the previous URL to build up a phony Discord site. Unfortunately, Ozzy and his partner firms kept the old Tweets with the old link up, directing hundreds of people to the scam site.

Consequence also reports that the total number of members mentioned on the false site at one time was 1,330, which might very well represent the number of people who were possibly duped by the hoax. Users were directed to link their cryptocurrency wallets in order to conduct transactions, after which their accounts were drained of thousands of dollars of Ethereum. Tim Silman, a nonprofit employee, told The Verge that he was conned out of $400 in Ethereum and discovered that he wasn’t the only victim.

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“I’ve seen at least a dozen people on Twitter voicing this same issue. If you look at the transactions on Etherscan, others lost a lot more than me.”

Silman attempted to alert the various CrytpoBatz partners by tagging them in tweets, but to no effect. Only after The Verge contacted CryptoBatz was the incorrect link deleted from the postings on January 21st, a few days after “minting” began and three weeks after the project’s official announcement.

When contacted by The Verge, Sutter Systems, the company that created the CryptoBatz NFT, blamed Discord for the enormous blunder.

“Although we feel very sorry for the people that have fallen prey to these scams, we cannot take responsibility for the actions of scammers exploiting Discord — a platform that we have absolutely no control over. In our opinion this situation and hundreds of others that have taken place across other projects in the NFT space could have easily been prevented if Discord just had a better response/support/fraud team in place to help big projects like ours.”

Discord also issued a general statement.

“Our Trust & Safety team is in touch with the server owners and are investigating the incident. Our team takes action when we become aware of attacks like this one, including banning users and shutting down servers.”

Ozzy Osbourne’s newest CryptoBatz tweet was released on Thursday (January 20th), informing users that a limited quantity of NFTs was now accessible to the public following an initial “minting” for whitelist members. Individual CryptoBatz NFTs are currently reportedly selling for around $5,000 worth of Ethereum on the open market. To get the latest updates, Keep an eye on Thirsty.

What’s your opinion on this one? Let us know in the comments!!

Shivangini Rawat

Shivangini is a law student with a passion for writing and music. She writes for Thirstyfornews and enjoys cooking, baking, and playing various instruments. In her free time, she watches movies, TV shows, and anime, with a love for bands like Alcest and Scorpions.

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