British NFT Investments says hackers stole $250,000 worth of assets

NFT Investments, a British company that as its name suggests invests in companies developing non-fungible tokens (NFTs), announced on Thursday that it lost $250,000 of assets in a cyberattack.

The company, which describes itself as working with “entrepreneurs to develop NFT assets,” disclosed the incident through the London Stock Exchange’s (LSE) Regulatory News Service as its shares are listed on the Aquis Stock Exchange Growth Market.

The company said it discovered “a fraudulent phishing attack from an unknown external source” on Monday, although it did not explain how its assets were lost.

It “immediately implemented its incident response plan and will commission a third party report to investigate the circumstances of the incident,” said the notice.

The loss represents “less than 1%” of the value of the company’s current net assets, according to the disclosure.

NFT Investment’s unaudited interim results published in September reported just over £30 million ($36.6 million) in total net assets, including over £20 million in cash, alongside a £4.2 million loss for the six months ending June 30, 2022.

"The Company will inform the market if there are any notifiable changes to the situation," the notice said.

Cyber thefts and fraud have been a recurrent feature of the cryptocurrency and decentralized finance (DeFi) space over the past year.

Among the most successful criminal groups working in this space is one working on behalf of the North Korean government, which in December was blamed by South Korean intelligence for stealing more than $1.2 billion over the past five years, half of it in 2022.

The culprits behind many incidents remain unknown.

At the end of December, BIT Mining, one of the biggest cryptocurrency mining companies in the world, announced that it had lost about $3 million in a cyberattack. In September, the cryptocurrency company Wintermute said it was “hacked for about $160 million” according to its founder and chief executive Evgeny Gaevoy.

That followed $625 million being stolen from Ronin Network in March in a hack the U.S. later blamed on North Korea. More than $30 million of that heist was subsequently seized by law enforcement agencies, according to a report from blockchain research company Chainalysis.