The actor who paid $300,000 to get back... a drawing of a monkey
We’re kicking off week 9 with a story that mixes Hollywood, a textbook phishing scam, and a legal question that even the courts didn’t have a clear answer to at the time.
Seth Green, the actor known for "Family Guy," "Austin Powers," and "Robot Chicken," bought a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT in July 2021: #8398, which he affectionately nicknamed "Fred Simian." It wasn’t just a collector’s whim: Green spent months developing an animated series called "White Horse Tavern," with Fred as the undisputed star, blending NFT characters with real-life actors.
The important detail, little known outside the crypto world, is that the Bored Ape Yacht Club gives each owner full commercial rights to their own ape. In other words, Green didn’t just own an image; he legally had the right to turn Fred into a TV star.
On May 8, 2022, days before the series made its public debut, Green fell for a fake site posing as an NFT minting platform and lost four pieces from his collection, including Fred. The scammer sold him almost immediately to a collector who went by “Mr. Cheese,” for around $200,000.
And this is where the story gets truly bizarre: when Green lost the NFT, he also automatically lost the commercial rights to the character. His own series was legally frozen overnight because he no longer owned the rights to its main character.
Green, who once publicly said he had studied copyright law for 18 years, tried everything: he publicly asked for the NFT to be returned on social media, sent direct messages to the new owner, and even suggested he would take the case to court to set a legal precedent on whether an NFT that’s stolen and resold in good faith still legally belongs to its original owner.
It never made it to court. In June 2022, Green ended up paying 165 ETH—around $260,000–$300,000, nearly $100,000 more than he had originally paid for the NFT—just to get it back and continue with his series.
The truly bizarre thing about all this is the question that was never fully resolved: legally, who was Fred’s actual owner while he was in “Mr. Cheese’s” wallet? The latter had bought him in good faith on the open market, unaware that he was stolen. To this day, this legal gray area remains one of the weakest points in the whole narrative of “ownership” in the NFT world.
What makes me think the most about this story is that, in any other context, paying a ransom for something of yours that was stolen would sound absurd. But in the NFT world, where ownership and code are fused, sometimes the only way to get back what’s yours is to literally buy it back.
What do you think: was Green right to pay to avoid a long, uncertain trial, or should he have fought the case in court to set a real precedent?
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