Goblin Asses, an NFT collection of 8,888 unique Goblin Asses, was hijacked earlier this month right before launch.

As reported by Web3 is Doing Great, the scammer copied their thousands of cartoons of goblin butts and posted them as their own collection on OpenSea.

The NFT collection is a spinoff of Goblin Town, a highly successful NFT collection whose founders pretend to write and speak in goblin tongue. With a floor price of around $10,000, Goblin Town attracted a large following on Twitter and has a variety of knockoffs, including  Goblin Pride, FatGremlin, Gremlinville, OrcVillage, and the Shrek-themed Ogretown.

Goblin Asses was made by artist Vitaly Terletsky, who teamed up with Linnik to quickly made a collection and put up the testing collection on Twitter and OpenSea within three days. It is believed that the scammer either found their semi-public website, which already had the images and metadata up, or stole the testing version off of OpenSea, which is publicly viewable.

Linnik and Terletsky had made a mistake. While most people only post a small amount of NFTs on the testing website, they uploaded the whole Goblin Asses collection in their haste. He commented: “We just didn’t think there would be bad actors caring about a free mint collection with 170 people on Twitter like ours.”

OpenSea has suffered from art theft for a while, often created by its “lazyminting” tool. Despite limiting its usage and introducing a wide range of tools to circumvent this phenomenon like NFT copy detection, there is still much work left over for their image recognition tools and human moderators at the end of the day.

The team has gone ahead and launched the real Goblin Asses collection despite the ordeal, this team with a little holographic sticker in the top corner, specifying each JPG has what Linnik calls a “certificate of ass-enticity.”