Earlier this month, Seth Green lost four NFTs after accidentally getting caught up in a phishing scam. Unfortunately, the event presented a problem as one of the NFTs stolen, Bored Ape Yacht Club #8398 or Fred Simian, meant that his animated project would be put on hold after losing the rights to the NFT and star of the project.
Fred Simian was set to be a protagonist for the upcoming series, White Horse Tavern, which would incorporate characters from Seth Green’s extensive NFT collection. Unfortunately, with the token stolen, Green lost the license to commercially adapt his ape. He took to Twitter to mourn his loss.
“I bought that ape in July 2021, and have spent the last several months developing and exploiting the IP to make it into the star of this show,” Green revealed. “Then days before — his name is Fred, by the way — days before he’s set to make his world debut, he’s literally kidnapped.”
Apart from the Bored Ape, the actor and producer lost two Mutant Apes and a Doodle after unknowingly interacting with a phishing site. One of his two Mutant Apes was flipped for $42,000, while Fred was purchased for more than $200,000 from collector DarkWing84, who placed the Bored Ape together with his other NFT collections.
After a series of deep investigations, people quickly found the collector and his Twitter account. Taking the name Mr Cheese on the social media platform, Fred’s new owner revealed that he bought the NFT because he liked it.
“I have no plans for the ape,” revealed Mr Cheese. “As you can see, I have been collecting for a while. I bought it because I liked it. It wasn’t a cheap buy either and was not marked as suspicious, so I bought it in good faith. I’m happy to be in contact with Seth to chat about this.”
While Seth Green followed Mr Cheese, he made it clear that he was willing to pursue legal action before later stating that he would rather meet the collector than take things to court.
