Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT Worth $300,000 Accidentally Sold for $3,000

Owning a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT is near impossible right now unless you’ve got some serious dough. The cheapest one, which runs for 52 ether (or $210,000), according to CNET, is barely accessible to most. But one buyer just scored an even more valuable NFT for a fraction of that price.

A man named Max, username maxnaut, apparently made a “fat-finger error” on Saturday when trying to trade his 75 ether, or around $300,000, Bored Ape NFT. Basically, a decimal point was way off, and Max ended up selling the NFT for .75 ether, losing his token rather quickly after it was listed at around $3,066. It was bought instantly.

The buyer who scooped it up ended up adding an additional $34,000 to the purchase and went on to post it back online for $248,000. CNET believes it was likely purchased by a bot coded to spot NFTs below a certain price range.

“How’d it happen? A lapse of concentration I guess,” Max told the publication. “I list a lot of items every day and just wasn’t paying attention properly. I instantly saw the error as my finger clicked the mouse but a bot sent a transaction with over 8 eth [$34,000] of gas fees so it was instantly sniped before I could click cancel, and just like that, $250K was gone.”

Banks will usually catch bizarre transactions, but in the case of NFTs, things are decentralized so there’s no telling how quickly someone can take advantage of a judgement lapse. Something similar happened in August, when a person accidentally listed their Bored Ape for $26,000 and saw it be flipped for the then-market price of $150,000, CNET reports.

“The industry is so new, bad things are going to happen whether it’s your fault or the tech,” Max said. “Once you no longer have control of the outcome, forget and move on.”