Magic Eden Issue Leads to Fake NFT Listings, Will Refund Affected Users

Non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace Magic Eden on Wednesday said an isolated issue allowed fake NFTs to be listed and sold as part of real collections.

Magic Eden acknowledged the issue on Twitter, asking users to "hard refresh" their browsers.

Y00ts, one of the higher-priced collections on Magic Eden created by DeGods, was impacted by the issue, with a handful of fake Y00ts sold to unsuspecting buyers.

DeGods released a statement to its community warning users of the issue shortly after it began.

The fake listings began early on Wednesday with the ABC collection, which the marketplace appeared to have solved by adding more verification layers, according to a tweet.

Meanwhile, Magic Eden said in a Thursday update that the issue was resolved and that it would refund affected users. "This issue's impact was contained to 13 NFTs across five collections. These NFTs were used in 27 transactions amounting to around 1.1K SOL," the developers wrote, worth roughly $14,800 as of Thursday evening.

Magic Eden said the mixup was caused by a "UI issue due to a new feature deployment that we released to our Snappy Marketplace and Pro Trade tools."

"Unfortunately, there was a bug deployed in an update to both of these features, where NFTs were not verified before being listed into these two tools, which automatically included the items into the collection at large," developers explained before detailing heightened security measures put in place as a result.

It’s the second snag Magic Eden experienced this week. On Tuesday, users reported seeing pornographic images in place of their NFTs, an issue the marketplace identified as linked to its third-party image caching service.

UPDATE (Jan. 5, 22:27 UTC): Updates with Magic Eden's decision to refund impacted users and the cause of the issue.