The fraudster advertised a fake Banksy NFT on the artist’s official website, sold the non-fungible token on the OpenSea market for $ 338,000, and then returned almost all the money to the buyer.
This week, the official website of the artist Banksy revealed information about the sale of NFT, which was then auctioned off on the OpenSea market for 100 ETH. However, according to a statement from the artist’s team, the “Great Redistribution of the Climate Change Disaster” artwork, inspired by the CryptoPunk project, is not owned by Banksy.
“It all happened so quickly,” said Pranksy, the investor who bought the fake NFT.
User Yosefo contacted Pranksy yesterday morning via the messaging app Discord and talked about Banksy’s NFT auction. Yosefo shared a link to the official Banksy site, which posted information about the work, and a link to the NFT auction on OpenSea. Then Pranksy
did a bid of 100 ETH, after which the auction suddenly ended.
“I suspected something was wrong when the offer was accepted so quickly,” Pranksy said.
Screenshot of the Discord conversation between Pranksy and Yosefo.
An hour and a half after the auction ended, the NFT ad on Banksy’s website was removed. After about eight hours, the scammer returned Pranksy 97.69 ETH.
“I have no idea why he returned the money. Perhaps he realized that I had tracked him down, ”said Pranksy.
He noted that he was misled by the fact that information about the NFT appeared on the official Banksy website. He said that the artist’s team was probably partly responsible for the development of the situation.
“I will not make a claim,” Pranksy said. “It was my choice.”
Later he wrote on Twitter, which has nothing to do with the emergence of information about NFT on Banksy’s website and would never “risk a future possible relationship with the artist” in order to buy NFT from himself.
Recall that in June, the British auction house Phillips announced that it would accept payment in ETH and BTC when selling the work of artist Banksy “Laugh Now Panel A”, which is estimated at between $ 2.8 and $ 4.1 million.

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