NFT Trader's old smart contracts contained reentrancy vulnerabilities that allowed attackers to drain NFT collateral. Multiple actors exploited the flaw to steal 13 Mutant Apes, 37 Bored Apes, and other high-value NFTs worth ~$3M total.

On December 16, the SlowMist security team issued an alert that @NftTrader appeared to have been exploited due to a reentrancy issue. On December 17, the NFT Trader hacker claimed in on-chain messages that the original attack had been perpetrated by someone else, but that they were one of the many copycat attackers, describing themselves as someone who had "[come] here to pick up residual garbage". They requested victims send additional ETH to get their NFTs back. "If you want the monkey nft back, then you need to pay me a bouty, which is what I deserve", they wrote, asking for NFT holders to send them 10% of the Ape floor price. On December 17, Boring Security tweeted, "All 36 BAYC and 18 MAYC that the exploiter had are now in our possession. We sent her 10% of the floor price of the collections as bounty. We will be working with the affected victims getting them back to them free of charge."