Big Daddy Ape Club Hack

TOTAL LOST $1.2M
Medium Rugpull

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2022 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #793 By amount stolen
Protocol Type Exit Scam/Rugpull Target category

Incident Overview

On January 11, scammers staged one of the largest NFT scams in the history of the Solana blockchain. The scammers made off with 9,136 SOL, or about $1.3 mln, in funds sent by would-be collectors to mint the Big Daddy Ape Club NFT. The owners of the Big Daddy Ape Club project were able to abscond with funds despite the fact that the NFT drop was "verified" by decentralized identity verification company Civic. Civic now says it's working with law enforcement to find those responsible for the scam.

The Big Daddy Ape Club was introduced as a collection of 2,222 monkey-themed NFTs to be minted on the Solana blockchain and listed on the Solanart NFT marketplace.

Mert, a software engineer at Coinbase and a Solana researcher said he traced the Solana scammer's wallet, and that some of the funds were transferred to accounts on the Binance crypto exchange. The exchange said it has suspended the accounts and will also be working with law enforcement to investigate.

The address behind the case:

https://solscan.io/account/C2JoNvhfh4WYLUzDDE4YFeqsMQT3UrexJKfARA1JYYmw

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Big Daddy Ape Club
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Rugpull
Classification NFT
Primary Source View Post-Mortem #1 View Post-Mortem #2 View Post-Mortem #3

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Exit Scam/Rugpull
Protocol Twitter/X @BigDaddyApeClub
Team Anonymous
Source Code Unverified

What the Attacker Needed to Succeed

Understanding the prerequisites for this type of attack helps auditors identify protocols that are most at risk and helps developers build better defenses.

Technical Knowledge Deep understanding of rugpull and Solidity and EVM internals
Capital Required Seed capital to cover gas and initial position setup
On-Chain Access Ability to interact with smart contracts and deploy a custom exploit contract
Protocol Analysis Identification of the exploitable vulnerability in Big Daddy Ape Club's contract logic - root cause: nft
Execution Speed Precise transaction ordering and timing to exploit the vulnerability within a single atomic block
Obfuscation Plan A strategy to launder and move stolen funds - typically through mixers, cross-chain bridges, or decentralized DEX swaps to resist tracing

What Auditors Should Check

Could this have been caught in audit? Hard to catch — private key / OpSec failures are outside smart contract audit scope

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Big Daddy Ape Club, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (January 2022).

  • Verify all logic paths related to Rugpull are guarded by proper access controls and input validation
  • Review privileged functions (owner, admin, governance) for potential abuse vectors - centralization risks should be documented and bounded with timelocks or multi-sigs

Master these auditing techniques with hands-on labs and real exploit scenarios in the Smart Contract Hacking course.

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Sources & References

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