Although digital art is causing a furor among investors and collectors, the misinformation that exists in this environment has been the cause of multiple electronic fraud cases that already reach millionaire figures. The most recent incident has to do with Banksy, the popular street artist who has remained anonymous for years.
According to reports, a collector paid more than $300,000 USD in Ethereum for a non-fungible token (NFT) allegedly created by Banksy; however, a spokesperson for the artist mentioned that his client had nothing to do with this token. Although the seller of this digital art show returned the cryptocurrency transaction, the collector undoubtedly had a harrowing time while feeling scammed.
BBC was able to interview the buyer of this NFT, identified as Pranksy, who mentioned that he learned about this auction of this digital artwork through a Discord server for users of OpenSea, the most important NFT market in the world.
The collector assures that he never doubted the legitimacy of this work, since the seller even published a link to Banksy’s official site. Although the link no longer redirects anywhere, using the Wayback Machine service it was possible to verify that this link did redirect to the NFT work, published on the artist’s official site.
The NFT seller accepted Pranksy’s offer shortly after receiving it and proceeded to remove the link that redirected to the artist’s official site, triggering the buyer’s suspicions of potential fraud. These suspicions were confirmed soon after, when the artist’s representative stated that “Banksy has not created any artwork related to NFT.”
Although by this point Pranksy had already resigned himself to losing his virtual assets, the collector himself confirmed that the scammer returned the Ethereum transaction, which appears in the Etherscan registry. This alleged scammer did not added any comments during the transaction, so it has become impossible to know more about this incident.
The final conclusion of this anecdote is that many security mechanisms are needed for the proper use of NFT as a digital art. While this is an innovative method for both digital artists and collectors, there are multiple groups of threat actors who will try to use this new trend for their own malicious purposes.
To learn more about information security risks, malware variants, vulnerabilities and information technologies, feel free to access the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) websites.
He is a well-known expert in mobile security and malware analysis. He studied Computer Science at NYU and started working as a cyber security analyst in 2003. He is actively working as an anti-malware expert. He also worked for security companies like Kaspersky Lab. His everyday job includes researching about new malware and cyber security incidents. Also he has deep level of knowledge in mobile security and mobile vulnerabilities.
