How to Prevent NFT Thefts

As NFTs grow in popularity and the number of their users increases, they attract a growing number of scammers.

In Web3 it is possible to become a victim of all sorts of criminals who target digital collectibles. Millions of dollars have been lost to fraud and various attacks.

According to Web3 technology professionals, there are many ways and tools to avoid becoming a victim of NFT theft.

Also users can take various actions after losing their digital collectibles due to hacks.

However, the first and most important step in securing your assets is due diligence.

It is worth avoiding clicking on suspicious links and one must be very careful when signing token approvals, so as not to accidentally send your assets to scammers.

You should regularly check and revoke unnecessary approvals to send NFTs.  To avoid theft of all your assets, you should separate NFTs and keep them in different wallets according to their purpose.

Long-term deposits and NFTs that you plan to hold for the long term and won't be selling in the near future should be kept in a secure wallet that has minimal or no interaction with the applications.

It's best to keep these assets in a wallet that is not connected to third-party applications.

You should also use hardware wallets more often. 

What you can do after losing assets

Unfortunately at the moment users "not much" can do to recover assets. However, NFT trading platforms can blacklist stolen NFTs so that they can no longer be traded.

With this approach, it makes no sense for scammers to steal someone else's NFTs since they won't be able to sell them. This serves as a prevention of possible theft of assets of others.

Another way to prevent theft is to raise awareness of common types of scams. Forewarned is forearmed.

Raising user awareness is an ongoing effort. The first step is to inform users about the safest ways to make transactions and how they can minimize their risk.

While hardware wallets can be a great solution for protecting deposits, it is worth following a few important conditions. Chief among them is that people should buy hardware directly from the manufacturer to minimize the chance that the wallet has been counterfeited or hacked before a person receives it.

In general, it is not advisable to buy hardware wallets on the secondary market.

If fraud or an attack has already occurred, victims should report it to databases such as NotCommon "to help keep others safe and identify the fraudster."

If the potential losses are significant, it is advisable to go to court, if possible, so that the scammers can be punished. After all, impunity breeds new crimes.

Since NFT is one of the fastest-growing areas of cryptography, it is becoming a "prime target for hackers."

NFT transfers create a new problem for cryptocurrency investigations, as decentralized protocols are more complex and very difficult to trace compared to traditional centralized services.

In addition to reporting thefts to law enforcement, NFT owners can protect their investments with tools such as Storyline, an analytics software.

This tool will allow users to assist investigators after a hack and help them focus on necessary transactions and asset movements.

Users can use tools such as revoke.cash, which is a way to check wallet status and revoke approvals, and browser extensions that provide risk warnings before signing contracts.

We shouldn't forget that developers aren't standing still either, trying to protect users' assets to make the crypto industry safer and more accessible to a wide range of users.

The community is making efforts to provide more security tools specific to NFT.

There is an NFT tool - GoPlus, which identifies the authenticity of NFT.

DappBay’s Red Alarm and AvengerDAO help users prevent fraud. These tools assess project risk levels in real-time and warn users about potentially dangerous dApps so that users do not interact with malicious dApps and contracts.

The number of such tools is growing, because the main goal of developers is to prevent fraud and theft so that people lose less of their money and trust cryptocurrencies more.