Short answer

Almost never recoverable. NFTs are bearer tokens on the blockchain — whoever controls the address that holds the NFT is the owner. If your wallet was drained and the NFT moved to an attacker's address, the blockchain considers them the rightful owner. The exceptions are narrow: high-profile stolen NFTs sometimes get returned through community pressure, OpenSea or magiceden may freeze the NFT from their marketplace listings (but not from the blockchain itself), and US law enforcement has occasionally seized stolen NFTs in major cases.

What "recovery" can actually mean

1. The attacker returns it voluntarily. Rare. Sometimes happens with white-hat researchers who steal to demonstrate a vulnerability and then return. The Inferno Drainer team did not return anything.

2. Marketplace freezes prevent legitimate-seeming resale. OpenSea, Blur, LooksRare maintain "stolen NFT" lists. If you report your theft within hours, they may freeze marketplace listings. The NFT still belongs to the attacker on-chain, but they can't easily sell it through major marketplaces. They can move it via P2P or to smaller marketplaces.

3. Law enforcement seizure. For high-value cases (multi-million-dollar collections), FBI and Chainalysis Reactor have traced stolen NFTs to attackers and seized them. Slow (months to years), expensive, and only for substantial losses.

4. Insurance claim. Coincover and other specialized crypto-theft insurance policies cover NFTs. Premiums are high (1-3% of insured value annually). Most US homeowner policies do not cover crypto/NFT theft.

Immediate actions after theft

Within 24 hours:

  1. Report to OpenSea (and any other marketplace where the NFT was listed) for stolen-NFT flagging.
  2. Tweet the theft with the NFT ID and attacker wallet address. Community awareness sometimes pressures buyers to refuse the stolen NFT.
  3. File FBI IC3 complaint at ic3.gov with transaction details. Required for insurance claims and any future law-enforcement involvement.
  4. File police report for the same reason.
  5. Document everything: transaction IDs, attacker wallet, timeline of events.

The OpenSea freeze and community pressure are time-sensitive. Acting within 24 hours significantly increases the chance the NFT can't be quickly liquidated.

Why this is harder than fungible-token theft

A drained 100 USDC is fungible — the attacker mixes it with other USDC and sells. There's no specific 100 USDC to "recover." An NFT is unique — token ID #4242 on Bored Ape Yacht Club is identifiable forever. This makes the attacker's resale harder (good for victim) but doesn't change the on-chain ownership rules (bad for victim).

Prevention

The same approval-phishing defenses apply: never sign setApprovalForAll for marketplaces you don't actively use, run revoke.cash quarterly, use a separate "vault" wallet for valuable NFTs that never connects to any dApp, only transfer to a "trading" wallet when you actually want to list.

Further reading: setApprovalForAll, Phishing.