"There is no mint going on today. It looks like BAYC Instagram was hacked. Do not mint anything, click links or link your wallet to anything," the NFT projectwrote on Twitter.

The fraudulent link claimed that users could mint "land" in the upcomingOthersideMeta, which is due to launch later this week.

The wallets of those who clicked the link have now been compromised, with a series of Bored Apes and Mutant Apes being transferred tonew wallets by the hackers.

At the time of writing, it is estimated that around 24 Bored Apes and 30 Mutant Apes have been stolen, according to recentOpenSea transfers, although some of these may be holders transferring their non-fungible tokens for security purposes.

The value of the 54 NFTs calculated by floor price is $13.7 million.

Yuga Labs says the scope of the attack is far smaller.

"The hacker posted a fraudulent link to a copycat of the Bored Ape Yacht Club website, where a safeTransferFrom attack asked users to connect their MetaMask to the scammer's wallet in order to participate in a fake Airdrop," a spokesperson told CoinDesk via email. "At 9:53am ET, we alerted our community, removed all links to Instagram from our platforms and attempted to recover the hacked Instagram account."

Yuga Labs and Instagram are still investigating how the account was compromised, the spokesperson said.

"Rough estimated losses due to the scam are 4 Bored Apes, 6 Mutant Apes, and 3 BAKC, as well as assorted other NFTs estimated at a total value of ~$3m," the spokesperson said. "We are actively working to establish contact with affected users."