An NFT power player, who owns a whopping 57 Bored Apes, says he accidentally lost $150,000 in a prank auction bid

A major NFT investor who owns 57 digital artworks from the Bored Ape Yacht Club said he lost $150,000 via a prank bid.

Investor Franklin Caldwell, whose Twitter handle is @franklinisboredsaid he lost 100 ETH by jokingly bidding on a so-called Ethereum Name System (ENS) domain, which is basically a crypto wallet address in readable form that is minted as an NFT.

He seemed to mock how some users do this often, creating fake domains with fake bids so that a Twitter bot would call EnsBidBot would tweet about the offer.

ENS domains are the crypto world’s way of translating complex wallet addresses so we can read them more easily, the addresses are usually 42 characters long and start with “0x.” It’s a bit like how traditional websites use the Domain Name System, or DNS, to turn regular .com domain names in your browser into IP addresses that help computers find a website.

If you have seen people as comedians Jimmy Fallon and actor Anthony Hopkins with a “.eth” at the end of their Twitter profile names, which is likely the domain name for their ETH crypto addresses.

In accordance Molly White who keeps the world up to date on cautionary crypto stories with his blog “Web3 is just fine” Caldwell created an ENS domain called stop-doing-fake-bids-its-honestly-lame-my-guy.eth and placed a 100 ETH bid on it.

He thought he had the last laugh when someone offered him 1.9 ETH, or about $2,900, for what amounted to a joke. Caldwell accepted before realizing that the person was able to turn around and make off with 100 ETH since he had forgotten to cancel the offer.

The person pocketed the money and sold the domain name back to Caldwell, who took to Twitter shortly after to apologize for his mistake.

“Oh no, I lost 100 ETH,” he posted on Wednesday. “I celebrated my joke about a domain sale, shared the spoils, but in a dream of greed forgot to cancel my own bid of 100 ETH to buy it back. This will be the joke and bag fumble of the century. I deserve all the jokes and criticism.”

He also said he had refunded 1.9 ETH back to the person, hoping they would return the full offer, to no avail. The seller, who goes by @8892OS on Twitter, tweeted in response“I ripped this guy for 100 eth and he only sent me another 1.9?”

Caldwell did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for an interview.