More than $100m worth of NFTs stolen since July 2021, data shows

More than $100m (£85m) worth of non-fungible tokens were stolen in the year to July, research shows, with criminals making off with an average of $300,000 per scam.

Phishing scams, the most common type, entice users to accidentally hand over the credentials to their cryptocurrency wallets, with which a fraudster can initiate an irreversible transaction.

The $100m total does not even include the single largest NFT-related theft, of $500m of digital currency from NFT-based video game Axie Infinity. Those hackers, believed to be North Korean state actors, left the Pokemon-like NFTs alone, and instead stole the money that players had deposited in the system to power its in-game economy.