Finding out that my CrypToad was stolen, and why I gifted $4,000 to a total stranger

4 min readOct 21, 2021

Last week after accepting an offer for one of my NFTs, I found myself in possession of some WETH. Since I love CrypToadz and had some WETH to spare, I decided to try and buy another Toad.

I proceeded to do some research and put in some offers on a few Toads.

Like I do almost every hour, I glanced at the CrypToadz’s sales activity tab on CrypToadzs’ Open Sea page and saw a user named “Eploni” (NOTE: name has been changed) conducting a fire sale of his Toadz. I assumed Eploni was liquidating his Toadz to free up capital, and I quickly checked to see if he had any more Toadz. Sure enough he did — the beautiful CrypToad 5788 (ranked #720 rarest overall out of 6969). “What the heck” I thought, and submitted a bid on 5788.

As I went submit a bid on another Toad, I found that I had an insufficient amount of WETH in my wallet. Confused, I went to my OpenSea profile page and was shocked to see that my offer for Toad 5788 had been accepted!

I was so excited! I had found my grail Toad!

Congrat-

I went to the CrypToadz Discord to share the good news. However, after scrolling through some messages it quickly became apparent that I’d inadvertently purchased a stolen Toad.

Wait, I just bought a stolen Toad??

As it turned out, Eploni’s account had been hacked. The thief had accepted the highest bid on each of Eploni’s NFTs before making away with all of the ETH. Eploni reported this to OpenSea and his account was marked as potentially compromised.

Getting in contact with Eploni

Eploni tweeted about what happened to him and I immediately contacted him. I told him I’d happily sell his Toad back to him for cost + fees, and sent over a private listing to repurchase it.

However, Eploni told me that since his ETH was stolen he didn’t think he could buy it back. The following day Eploni confirmed that unfortunately he didn’t have the funds to buy the Toad back and that I could proceed to sell it.

Deciding to give the profits to Eploni

Since I knew that the Toad was stolen, it didn’t feel right for me to profit from it. While ideally it would have been nice to hold onto the Toad until Eploni could one day pay me back… Eploni himself didn’t know when that would be, and the market could fluctuate and the price could decrease (which — in the following days — is exactly what happened).

Therefore I decided to sell the Toad and — after taking out the principle — I would send Eploni any profits garnered from the sale. Additionally, since Eploni’s Toad hadn’t claimed its Choadz or Sockz, I’d send over the profits from those sales as well.