'Rooted in Deception:' 'Bored Ape' NFT Investors Sue Sotheby's Auction House

Investors who purchased Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs at highly inflated prices during the 2021 NFT craze have filed a lawsuit against the Sotheby’s auction house and other defendants, alleging deceptive practices. The Bored Ape co0llection, like most NFTs, have cratered in values in the years since the craze.

Ars Technica reports that Sotheby’s auction house has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by investors who regret buying Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs. Investors are alleging that they were misled into purchasing NFTs at excessively high prices during the NFT craze of 2021. The lawsuit asserts that the Bored Ape NFTs being sold by Sotheby’s auction gave them “an air of legitimacy… to generate investors’ interest and hype around the Bored Ape brand.” Within the same year, Breitbart News reported the market for NFTs had crashed by a startling 70 percent.

Customers view an NFT gallery featuring “Degen Apes” at the Solana Space retail store at Hudson Yards in New York, US, on Monday, Aug. 8, 2022. Mikkel Morch, executive director at Digital Asset Investment Fund ARK36, said that he sees the recent efforts with Solanas mobile phone and the Solana Spaces store as emblematic of “Solana’s grand ambitions to become the pioneer of mainstream adoption of web3.” Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg

The lawsuit further claims that the boost to Bored Ape NFT prices provided by the auction “was rooted in deception.” It alleges that it wasn’t revealed at the time of the auction that the buyer was the now-disgraced crypto platform FTX. “Sotheby’s representations that the undisclosed buyer was a ‘traditional’ collector had misleadingly created the impression that the market for BAYC NFTs had crossed over to a mainstream audience,” the lawsuit stated. The plaintiffs argue that harmed investors bought the NFTs “with a reasonable expectation of profit from owning them.”

In September 2021, Sotheby’s sold a lot of 101 Bored Ape NFTs for $24.4 million at its “Ape In!” auction, well above the pre-auction estimates of $12 million to $18 million. That’s an average price of over $241,000. However, Bored Ape NFTs now sell for a floor price of about $50,000 worth of ether cryptocurrency, according to CoinGecko data.

The amended lawsuit alleges that Bored Ape NFT developer Yuga Labs “colluded with fine arts broker, Defendant Sotheby’s, to run a deceptive auction.” After the sale, a Sotheby’s representative described the winning bidder during a Twitter Spaces event as a “traditional” collector, the lawsuit said. The lawsuit claims that it turned out the auction buyer was now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, whose founder Sam Bankman-Fried is in jail awaiting trial on criminal charges. Ethereum blockchain transaction data shows that after the auction, “Sotheby’s transferred the lot of BAYC NFTs to wallet address 0xf8e0C93Fd48B4C34A4194d3AF436b13032E641F3,77 which, upon information and belief, is owned/controlled by FTX,” the complaint said.

The lawsuit alleges that Yuga Labs and Sotheby’s violated the California Unfair Competition Law, the California Corporate Securities Law, the US Securities Exchange Act, and the California Corporations Code. The plaintiffs also claim that Sotheby’s Metaverse, an NFT trading platform opened after the auction, “operated (or attempted to operate) as an unregistered broker of securities.”