A British collector shelled out nearly $ 340,000 in cryptocurrency for an NFT (non-fungible token) he believed to have been created by world famous artist Banksy, but it was actually a fake.
The UK-based 30-something collector known as Pranksy bought what he thought was an authentic digital work of art by the famous artist close to 340,000 dollars. What he did not know at the time of purchase was that there were no NFT shares associated with Banksy and that the artist had “created no NFT artwork“.
For those who don’t know, the NFT, or non-fungible tokens, are unique cryptographic tokens that are designed to represent ownership of a rare digital item, such as a work of art. Recently, the NFT market has completely collapsed as 90% of investors have given up. However, that had not stopped Visa from purchasing its first NFT for € 141,600 last month.
Bansky’s site had been hacked
It was on Banksy’s site that the poor buyer found a link to an NFT auction on the popular OpenSea marketplace. Pranksy quickly placed a bid for 100 ETH, effectively ending the auction the instant the bid was placed.
However, once his offer is accepted, the link that advertised it was suddenly removed from Banksy’s website, suggesting that the website had been hacked. After realizing that maybe it was a scam, he immediately tried to locate the hacker and even started following him on Twitter.
The most amazing thing about this story is that the buyer was almost fully refunded after purchasing the fake NFT, to the tune of ETH 97.69. Indeed, the collector revealed that he was reimbursed eight hours later after the media coverage and wondered if it was perhaps a ” ethical hacker who wanted to prove something “. The individual may also have become afraid after being found. Although most hackers keep the stolen money, sometimes it happens that some of them reimburse the sums stolen. The hacker behind the biggest theft in cryptocurrency history, for example, had $ 260 million stolen.
Source: The Verge