SpOokY aPeS
A horrific tale of crypto corruption, fraudulence and 10,000 Spooky Apes.
In September of 2021, I was contacted by an online gallery director, which we shall refer to as A-Gallery. The A-Gallery director presented me a “million dollar opportunity,” to create a derivative collection of the Bored Ape Yacht Club apes with spooky motifs to be launched on Halloween via OpenSea.
Until that moment, I had never heard of the term “Bored Ape” and that there was a yacht club in the web3. Naturally, I immediately declined the offer as I was unfamiliar with NFTs, and the Halloween deadline was too much to demand of my health. I explained how I developed an autoimmune disease three years prior after being in a coma from viral meningitis, and such a rushed project would be beyond my physical capabilities.
Two weeks later, A-Gallery contacted me again, this time, with vigorous desperation and...annoyance. After our initial conversation, they hired a well known crypto artist to create the Spooky Apes, but he couldn’t deliver. Monstrous long texts turned into gory social media DMs and relentless phone calls. With two an a half weeks left till Halloween, I agreed to design 100 Spooky Apes—mostly out of defeat, and partly out of my thirst to see if I could achieve what their famous crypto artist could not. A-Gallery put me in a WhatsApp group chat with their coder (who we shall call Y) in Texas, and I began 14hr–18hr day shifts to complete the apes in time.
Throughout this relentless work period A-Gallery kept changing the terms of our agreement. Instead of 100 apes, they wanted 10,000 apes instead. Also they kept altering the percentage of the profits, giving me different numbers on a daily basis, including the royalties. Between all this grueling back and forth negotiations, I grew to love my Spooky apes asset designs, with their lion tails. horror and holiday themed motifs, buttoned eyes, and devilish expressions. However, as I worked I dug deeper into the NFT community, and stated to piece together what an incredibly prestigious and successful the Bored Ape Yacht Club was. Thus I soon felt more and more apprehensive working on a project. A-Gallery met my concerns about copy right infringement by belittle me and pressuring me to complete the collection with more urgency.
I finished all 10,000 apes with three days to spare till the deadline. However, for the first time, A-Gallery wouldn’t respond to my messages. Hallows Eve came and went and still no response until I heard back from the coder Y. According to Y he wasn’t able to respond because he was on a mushroom retreat and A-Gallery was away in Spain. Furthermore, Y said he no longer wanted to upload and code the spooky ape assets and wanted me to do it from my IP address. At this point, I had done all my research and came to understand that this was not the appropriate way to go about selling such a collection.
Knowing how manipulative Y and A-Gallery could be, I had to take matters into my own hands. I screen-shotted my Illustrator file and Photoshoped the image to make it appear as if my file got corrupted. “Oh no!… The apes are gone, and I have no backups!”— I texted with pixilated grainy image as evidence.
To this day, I was never compensated for my work, and all the Spooky Apes rest, waiting in eternal slumber on my external hard-drive.
