OpenSea introduces new stolen item policy to combat NFT theft

Published at: Aug. 11, 2022

As asset theft remains one of the biggest headaches in the nonfungible token (NFT) space, NFT marketplace OpenSea is making an effort to tailor its policy to incorporate additional measures against stolen items.

In an announcement, the firm highlighted that its policies were made considering United States laws, were knowingly allowing the sale of stolen items is prohibited. However, the marketplace admitted that in some cases, buyers who unknowingly bought stolen items were penalized even though they were not at fault. Because of this and the NFT community’s feedback, the marketplace has adjusted its policy to expand the use of police reports.

Previously, police reports were used within the platform in escalated disputes. With the new update, they will be used to confirm all stolen item reports within the NFT platform. Without a police report within seven days, the platform will enable the buying and selling of the reported item again to avoid fake reports. Following this, the company has also made efforts to ease the process of re-enabling the buying and selling features once the stolen items are recovered.

The NFT platform also highlighted that it's working to find other solutions to tackle the problem of NFT theft at its roots. According to the announcement, the company is working on automating threat and theft detection.

A Twitter user praised the move describing it as a good first step and encouraged other platforms to follow suit while suggesting the consideration of the nuances of laws from other countries as well. On the other hand, some community members are still disgruntled, taking to Twitter to report their issues. A user wrote:

That’s funny because when my NFT was stolen, both Opensea and the NFT Company that created it, pretty much told me to go to hell. What a change in attitude. I guess it only matters when 1000s of people are complaining

— CompassionateNFTkidz (@COMPASSIONTENFT) August 11, 2022

Meanwhile, another user claimed that they had purchased a stolen NFT unknowingly, and the support staff at OpenSea recommended that the user sell it on another NFT marketplace.

In June, the NFT platform enabled additional security features to protect its users from NFT scams. The feature hides NFT transfers that are flagged as suspicious automatically. The goal of this is to ensure that only legitimate transactions are visible in the marketplace.