Why NFT Marketplace OpenSea Will Implement Crime Report Policy

Popular non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea announced changes to its crime reporting policy. Via their Twitter account, the team behind the platform addressed the issues with their old stolen items policy and why it was “damaging” users’ trust in the marketplace.

OpenSea said that they must implement a crime reporting and stolen items policy to stay compliant with U.S. laws. However, some users were penalized, when they unknowingly bought a stolen item.

The team behind the platform claims that they will introduce changes to these policies after reviewing community feedback. One of the first changes will require theft victims to file a police report during the first week of the events to prevent stolen items from circulating on the platform.

Otherwise, the item will continue to be freely traded on the market and the platform will “help prevent false reports” of stolen items. In addition, users will have faster access to items falsely reported as stolen.

The entire process will be simplified, the team behind the project said, to benefit the users. OpenSea added the following on the future of their stolen items policy, and the ways they planned on improving it:

In the long term, our key focus areas continue to be on finding solutions that tackle this problem at its root. Efforts are already underway to better automate threat and theft detection, such as blocking suspect URLs earlier. Beyond that, we are collaborating closely with ecosystem partners to help prevent and disincentivize theft, and building better education resources to help users stay safe in web3.

The team behind the platform praised the efforts taken by crypto wallet provider MetaMask. The latter’s newest iteration implements new options for users to have more control over the number of their tokens that they want MetaMask to access.

Many attacks on NFT holders trick owners into giving third parties access to their funds, this new feature is aimed at preventing this attack vector or to at least making it harder for bad actors to get full access to the users’ wallets.

ETH’s price with bullish momentum on the 4-hour chart. Source: ETHUSDT Tradingview
NFT Marketplace OpenSea Addresses Community Questions

In a separate update, the team behind the platform clarified that their new crime reporting policy will not be retroactively applied. This is to allegedly simplify the process for everyone on the platform, especially those that already completed the requirements from the old process.

Still, OpenSea provided the following email address for anyone looking to dispute this decision: support.opensea.io. Overall, the changes have been welcomed by the majority of users.

OpenSea is taking a step to prioritize the users and to prevent bad actors from transacting with stolen items while the platform re-gains its users’ trust. The team behind the digital marketplace acknowledged:

Allowing the sale of stolen items and operating with stolen goods is no sign of a healthy ecosystem…but neither is a lack of trust from those of you who got us here.