Seth Green’s “Kidnapped” Bored Ape Returns Home

Bored Ape #8398 is still marked with a “suspicious activity” label on OpenSea. It remains frozen, preventing the NFT from being bought or sold on the marketplace, but not from being transacted on other services like NFT Trader. OpenSea declined to comment.

If the transaction is what it appears to be, it concludes a crypto clown show that began in early May when Green’s NFT cache was looted after the actor succumbed to a phishing scam. “​​Well frens it happened to me,” he tweeted at the time. “Got phished and had 4NFT stolen.”

The theft was a real debacle for Green, who had been developing an animated series called White House Tavern featuring characters from his NFT collection — most notably Bored Ape #8398.

“I bought that ape in July 2021, and have spent the last several months developing and exploiting the IP to make it into the star of this show,” Green told entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuck at a May NFT conference. “Days before he’s set to make his world debut, he’s literally kidnapped.” That revelation inflamed an ongoing intellectual property debate around NFTs, as Bored Ape Yacht Club licenses theoretically confer commercial usage rights to purchasers. To whom did this entitlement belong, Green or Cheese? They both purchased it fair and square. Again, the blockchain doesn’t lie, right?

When confirmed to be the ape’s new owner by BuzzFeed News, Mr Cheese — who has also used the moniker “DarkWing84” — said they believed it was “bought in good faith” and claimed they had no idea it was illicitly obtained. The pseudonymous investor had purchased the NFT from Green’s scammer for a whopping $200,000.

So does this mean the case of Green’s “stolen” ape has been closed once and for all? Did he really pay twice for that monkey? Does crime pay? The actor had made it abundantly clear he’d go to extreme measures to reclaim it. The Bored Ape is now housed in a solitary wallet and Mr Cheese — who became something of a crypto antihero for unwittingly purchasing Green’s prized possession and being largely unaware of the meltdown that ensued — has since removed Bored Ape #8398 from their Twitter profile, as one does.