"Official" Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NFT project buys a fake IP rights contract

Illustration of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle holding a boombox to its earTMNT NFT Twitter profile picture (attribution)
A project to create Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NFTs stirred up a lot of excitement, garnering more than 100,000 Twitter followers on a verified Twitter account that described itself as "The Official TMNT NFT". Crypto research project "Rug Pull Finder" wrote on March 29 that they didn't believe the project owned the IP rights they needed. The TMNT project posted later that day same day, "Let's make it clear: we own the NFT digital rights of the Original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1987". Rug Pull Finder followed up with a detailed thread in late March outlining their belief that the project didn't own the proper rights to create the NFTs, writing that, "unless they can get cooperation from Viacom for the release of their collection, it will absolutely be a rugpull".

In late April, the Twitter account was suddenly suspended. On April 30, the TMNT project announced in their Discord that they had discovered that they had been sold a "fake IP rights contract", which they learned after communication from Paramount. They, probably overly optimistically, wrote that they would be pausing the project but they were hoping to "continue the project hand in hand" with Paramount.