OpenSea announces new features to tackle scams and theft

Leading NFT marketplace OpenSea has announced new features to prevent scams and theft on its platform.

One feature would proactively scan URLs shared on OpenSea to help identify if they are malicious ones, which typically purport to deliver free mints or fake benefits to users to connect their wallet to fraudulent websites, OpenSea said on November 1.

The new system will also simulate interaction and transaction with new URLs to identify malicious behaviors such as signature farming and wallet draining. Scammers that attempt to spread detected malicious links will have their accounts banned, their collections delisted and their transfer requests blocked.

The platform is also testing a new feature to detect NFT theft in real-time, and to prevent further resales of suspected stolen items using OpenSea.

“Ultimately, the goal of this work is to help make the ecosystem safer by reducing the downstream sales of stolen items – both using OpenSea and elsewhere in the NFT ecosystem – and thus reduce the incentive for NFT theft in the first place,” OpenSea said.

In August, OpenSea was sued in a court in the U.S. state of Michigan over its handling of NFTs deemed stolen. The company was asked to revise its policy, which it did in the same month. NFTs reported as stolen were frozen in transactions, and if a user purchased an NFT without knowing it was stolen, the asset would still be locked. Amid much controversy, the company announced that it would work on an automated system for early detection and blocking of suspicious URLs.