OpenC launches verified customer support to fight Discord scammers

On Tuesday, OpenSea and NFT communications platform Metalink announced a new partnership aimed at preventing social engineering attacks carried out via Discord DMs. As previously reported by The Verge, some Confidence tricksters posed as customer service agents on OpenSea's official Discord servers and defrauded NFT holders to make millions of dollars by sharing details, giving scammers control of their cryptocurrency wallets. allowed to do so.

OpenSea hopes to reduce these scams by using Metalink, which operates a "token gated" communications platform so that only users holding certain NFTs can gain access to its cryptocurrency wallet. When they do, they'll be connected with certified OpenSea support representatives, theoretically putting potential scammers out of the loop.

"OpenSea will partner with Metalink as we seek to engage more deeply with the NFT ecosystem," Stevie Tromberg, OpenSea's head of community, said in a statement. “Our goal is to create a direct channel for interacting with OpenC to receive support, provide feedback, receive updates, and share any other information that will help us serve you better.”

According to a press release from OpenSea, staff will spend a few hours each day handling support requests through the Metalink platform, and these requests will initially be limited to users who hold NFTs from Metalink's supported collection: Bored Ape Yacht Club. , Women's World, CyberKongz, and a few others.

The announcement is significant in that it includes an admission from OpenSea that Discord, the community building platform for cryptocurrency and NFT projects, is no longer viable as a way of providing customer support.

Social engineering attacks have plagued NFT Discord in general, and the chat platform says it is working hard to prevent these attacks from happening as well. But there is only so much time that OpenSea, a major force in the NFT economy, can push the message that "all DMs are scams" before pressure mounts to do something about it.

OpenSea's Discord server remains active and will still be used on behalf of the company to send many other types of official messages. But moving to another service for sensitive communications will likely weigh on their options in other NFT projects.