BANKSY

DESCRIPTION OF EVENTS

"With NFTs, artwork can be "tokenised" to create a digital certificate of ownership that can be bought and sold."

"In August 2021," "A link to an online auction for the NFT was posted on a now-deleted page of banksy.co.uk." "Banksy's official site had a new page called NFT which included a link to an auction site selling an NFT called Great Redistribution of the Climate Change Disaster."

"The auction ended early after the man offered 90% more than rival bidders." "He says he was first alerted to the auction by an anonymous person in his community on the social network Discord on Monday morning."

"[A] prominent NFT collector called Pranksy paid more than $336,000 for a fake Banksy NFT."

"So my bid of 100 ETH was accepted for the potential #Banksy first #NFT on @opensea. The link was removed from his website so it could have been a very elaborate hoax, my guess is that is what it will be, only time will tell!"

"Pranksy first learned about the artwork from a member of his Discord channel. The auction was also advertised on Banksy’s official page."

"About an hour after placing his offer, the seller of the NFT was accepted by the seller. But Banksy’s spokesperson told BBC that Banksy wasn’t involved in the creation of any NFT." Banksy's team told the BBC "any Banksy NFT auctions are not affiliated with the artist in any shape or form".

"Pranksy had been scammed." "The Banksy fan who got duped says he thought he was buying the world-famous graffiti artist's first ever NFT."

"I've just had a @BBC journalist confirm that the #NFT that was hosted on http://banksy.co.uk/nft.html was not a real banksy, hopefully I can get in touch with the team who represents him, if not it was fun entertainment for us all today."

Banksy's team did not respond to questions about how his site was compromised but said: "The artist Banksy has not created any NFT artworks."

"As it turned out, Banksy’s site was hacked and the fraudulent NFT auction was advertised, creating the perfect storm for a collector aptly named “Pranksy” to get scammed." "The man who is in his 30s and wanted to remain anonymous explained over Twitter direct messages that he suspects Banksy's site was hacked, and that he was the victim of an elaborate scam."

"He says the hacker returned all the money except for the transaction fee of around £5,000 on Monday evening." "Oddly enough, the hacker returned all the money to Pranksy except for the gas fees of roughly $6,700, only after Pranksy revealed who had shared the auction in the Discord and followed him on Twitter, likely spooking the scammer with fear of inevitable consequences."

"My ETH from the #Banksy #NFT purchase was just returned to me, ethical hacker proving a point?"

"The refund was totally unexpected, I think the press coverage of the hack plus the fact that I had found the hacker and followed him on Twitter may have pushed him into a refund."

"I feel very lucky when a lot of others in a similar situation with less reach would not have had the same outcome," he said.

Pranksy received an anonymous Discord message about a new NFT on the Banksy website, and placed the winning bid. No sooner had he done that then the NFT page was taken down and he found out the whole thing had been an elaborate fake. A hacker had hacked the banksy website, listed their NFT on OpenSea, and then promoted it extensively until it sold.

The Most Common NFT Scams (And How to Avoid Them) – Pastel (May 15)
Pranksy Fraudulent NFT Banksy OpenSea Scam | HYPEBEAST (Jun 8)
@pranksy Twitter (Jun 8)
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58399338 (Jun 8)
@pranksy Twitter (Jun 8)
Great Redistribution of the Climate Change Disaster (Jun 8)
Great Redistribution of the Climate Change Disaster - gaakmann Collection | OpenSea (Jun 8)
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x75fd10d8651727d9650770c2c59d532949586129f1962bf4ef743b948662fdd2 (Jun 8)
Banksy (Jun 8)
Great Redistribution of the Climate Change Disaster (Jun 8)
https://web.archive.org/web/20210831094030/http://banksy.co.uk/nft.html (Jun 8)
@pranksy Twitter (Jun 8)
@pranksy Twitter (Jun 8)
@pranksy Twitter (Jun 8)

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