Someone paid over $ 300,000 for a fake Banksy NFT – and the scammer gave it all back

The NFT space continues to be weird and at times wonderful, but today’s story deserves some sort of payoff: A collector paid over $ 300,000 in Ethereum for an NFT of someone claiming to be Banksy afterwards. that the image appeared on the famous street artist’s website. Next, Banksy’s spokesperson said the artist had no involvement with NFTs, and stories were published claiming it was a fake. Finally, the seller of NFT spontaneously reimbursed the collector, apparently without a note. Oh, and to really confuse the issue, the collector who bought the NFT is called Pranksy.

Pranksy told the BBC that he heard about the auction, which was being held at the NFT OpenSea Marketplace, from someone at his Discord. (The BBC does not identify Pranksy by name, but he has since revealed that he purchased the NFT, which is verifiable on his OpenSea page.) It seemed legitimate, as the seller had posted a link to a page on Banksy’s official website, at https://banksy.co.uk/nft.html, which the Wayback Machine confirms exists. The page showed a photo of the sold NFT, which shows a Cryptopunk-like person smoking in front of industrial chimneys.

Less than an hour later, the seller accepted Pranksy’s offer for over $ 300,000, leading him to suspect it was a scam. This suspicion was not helped by the removal of the NFT page from Banksy’s website. Next, the artist’s spokesperson told the BBC that there was no NFT action associated with Banksy and that the artist had “not created any NFT artwork”. At this point, Pransky more or less accepted that he had been scammed.

He was not the first. We’ve seen sellers trying to pass other artists’ work off as their own before, and if this situation involved just about any other artist, it probably wouldn’t be a question of a scam – especially considering the weirdness of duplicates. . The farce said The edge that another scammer created a double NFT and then offered it to him. The other person used a username similar to the original seller’s, typed a few more NFTs in the same style, then sent one to Pranksy. Since then, a torrent of other forgers has appeared, creating the same images as the NFTs, sending some to Pransky, and listing others for sale. It probably goes without saying that no one should buy them.

With Banksy, however, there is always a certain level of doubt as to what is or is not the artist’s work. This is the same person who says he tried to build a painting that shredded and saw his quote saying “copyright is for losers” returned to him in a trademark battle. What’s ironic, what’s real, and what’s not is usually at least a little hanging out with him. Although his team’s denials seem very clear, they did not come back to The edge or the BBC on how the link for the NFT verifiably ended up on Banksy’s website.

This note was supposed to be the end of the story, but then Pranksy asked me to say that the original scammer returned the Ethereum Pranksy paid for the NFT. Indeed, the transaction between the two portfolios appeared on Etherscan. Unlike the hacker who stole and then returned the Poly Network funds, the one behind it left no note when dismissing the Ethereum, making it difficult to determine his motives. Pranksy told me he hadn’t been in contact with the scammer other than adding the person who initially dropped the link in his Discord and following her on Twitter.

Getting a refund after a blockchain scam is not the norm. The system is designed to transfer funds from one wallet to another on a permanent basis, and there really is no way you can get funds back unless the person you sent them to decides to return them.

Just like we saw after the Poly Network attack, there have been accusations on Twitter that it was all a publicity stunt. Pranksy denies it, saying he wouldn’t want to risk a possible future relationship with Banksy.

So what did we learn today? For starters, it seems clear that NFT scams are still alive and well, as digital tokens continue to attract high paying buyers. We also took a look at how difficult things can be to verify in the internet age – an NFT appearing on Banksy’s website appears to be proof that it’s real, but everything else points to it’s happening. is a fake. Even now, it’s hard to say if we’ll ever know who really was behind this whole fiasco and what they hoped to accomplish. It really is could be anyone.