Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge
OpenSea has announced it will start freezing sales for NFTs that it suspects have been stolen in an attempt to stop scammers and hackers from flipping ill-gotten tokens. In a blog post on Wednesday, the company said it’s “beginning to test a new system” that will mark NFTs caught up in suspicious transactions as “under review,” blocking people from buying them using the platform.
Anne Fauvre-Willis, OpenSea’s VP of operations, marketplace, and integrity, tells Decrypt that the system will look at “a number of industry data sources,” as well as how the NFT was transferred out of the owner’s wallet and what else the wallets involved had going on around the time of the transfer. If it flags a transaction as suspicious, it’ll alert the NFT’s…