South Korea is utilizing the metaverse to strengthen its economic connections with Vietnam
Gyeongbuk Province in South Korea is utilizing the metaverse to strengthen its economic connections with Vietnam, while a sophisticated phishing scheme resulted in the theft of 14 Bored Ape Yacht Club non-fungible tokens.
The province of Gyeongbuk in South Korea has announced that it intends to make use of Web3 technology in order to strengthen its ties to the economy of Vietnam. According to Governor Lee Cheol-woo, the objective of the metaverse project is to strengthen ties between South Korea and the rest of the world by encouraging greater economic, cultural, commercial, and interpersonal exchanges.
This was stated as the project’s goal at a recent meeting. The government of the province had previously announced that it intended to make an investment of $13.8 million in order to establish itself as a centre for metaverse innovation with the goal of bolstering the economy of the surrounding area. In recent years, South Korea has invested a total of 186.7 million dollars into the development of an all-encompassing metaverse platform that they refer to as the Expanded Virtual World. This platform’s objective is to foster economic expansion and social cohesion across the nation by making available a range of virtual experiences. Some examples of these experiences include online education, virtual tourism, and virtual reality gaming.
A security researcher by the name of Serpent recently published a report on a scam in which social engineering tactics were used to steal 14 nonfungible tokens (NFTs) belonging to Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC). The theft took place over the course of one month. According to Serpent, the victim was first targeted when someone posing as a casting director for a film about NFT titled “The Return of Time” contacted them. This was the first time the victim was aware that they were being monitored.
The scammer created a fake website, made fake pitches, used fake legal contracts, and used other strategies (including Twitter Spaces) to establish credibility and make a bid on the NFTs while using the identity of a casting director for Forte Pictures, which is a legitimate business that had nothing to do with the scam. The victim’s funds were taken after they “signed the contract” on the bogus NFT platform after following the link to that platform.
According to Serpent, the fraudulent website misled the victim into believing that in order to obtain the license, they needed to sign a gas-less Seaport signature. However, in reality, the website would generate a private bundle listing of all of the victim’s BAYCs and send it to the scammer in exchange for a few cents worth of ETH.
The final phase of the scammer’s private sale involved the final step of using the match orders feature on the wallet that was funded by the Secret Network to accept the highest WETH bids on each NFT before converting them to DAI. The victim found out that their BAYCs had been stolen when they attempted to withdraw them from their wallet and discovered that the funds had been moved. Because the scammer probably used comparable schemes to defraud other people, Serpent issued a warning to the community that they should exercise caution when interacting with questionable websites, legal contracts, and other types of social engineering.
The analyst went on to encourage people who had fallen victim to similar cons to report the incident to the authorities and any other relevant parties, such as the NFT platform or the company that had been involved in the scam, in order to prevent similar incidents in the future.
