A former product manager at OpenSea has been charged with the first ever digital asset insider trading scheme.
OpenSea is THE top NFT marketplace platform.
If you want to buy and sell pictures of rocks or dubstep jingles, it's where you want to be.
Everyday, thousands of artist post new NFTs to OpenSea in hopes to trade their "one-of-a-kind" art for crypto.
Problem is, finding a way to stand out among a sea of artists (pun intended) is nearly impossible.
Best way is to hope OpenSea chooses your NFT and "features" it on on one of their category pages.
If you get featured, you basically hit the jackpot because you gain a tremendous amount of views to your project, which almost always equates to more bids.
The process of "How" OpenSea chooses which NFTs to feature is a bit ambiguous, but to increase your chances you should:
- Setup your NFT on OpenSea marketplace (duh)
- Post the link to your Opensea NFT on Instagram or Twitter
- Tag Opensea official Twitter and Instagram page @Opensea
- Also, use the hashtag #OpenSeaNFT in your posts
Oh, and there is a fifth step:
..... 5. Be a product manager that works for OpenSea
I'm sure you can see where this is going.
Here's how the scheme worked:
- The OpenSea product manager would pick unfeatured NFT projects and buy them with an anonymous wallet.
- He would then "recommend" those NFTs be featured on one of their top category pages
- Bids would start rolling in and he would flip the NFTs for some serious profit.
Absolutely diabolical.
In total, he is being accused of flipping 45 NFTs through September of 2021.
But, if he used anonymous wallets, how was he ever caught? I mean, the only people who use crypto are thieves and money launderers I hear.
Great question!
You see, the Product manager in question owned a very popular NFT, which he showed off by pointing people to the public validation on the blockchain.
As he sold these NFTs for profit in his anonymous wallets, he would then transfer the funds to a wallet that WAS known to be associated to him, tying him directly to the crime.
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