The mysterious graffiti artist from England Banksy got his website hacked seven days after his team warned him it might have security issues. A British collector and also fan got scammed with a $336,000-worth digital art. Luckily, the fan got his money back.
On Tuesday, Banksy’s digital art was promoted on his official website. It was an image that displayed one of the NFT collectibles called CryptoPunks.
NFT, also known as non-fungible tokens, represents unique digital items such as art. With NFT, the owners of the digital artwork can be bought and sold by creating an ownership certificate. People who buy NFTs carry certificates that indicate ownership of the original item. However, this certificate doesn’t mean buyers have copyright, which means other netizens can still access or view the digital item. Simply put, an NFT acts like an ownership receipt of a digital item.
Banksy fell prey to hackers Tuesday when his official website was hacked and scammed a fan out of $336,000 (£242,000). Security experts gave the graffiti artist a heads up that the website might be hacked. However, the artist ignored it.
Who is Banksy?
Banksy is an England-based graffiti artist, street artist, film director, and political activist. Although the artist is famous both online and offline, he keeps his identity a secret. He’s dubbed as the anonymous British graffiti artist.
He remains anonymous while creating his artwork and only reveals it when it gains traction on social media. Banksy’s style leans more towards stencils to make it quicker to paint. The great French graffiti artist Blek le Rat also has a significant influence on Banksy’s style.
NFT scam
A British collector thought he bought a world-renowned artist’s first-ever NFT, only to realize that the artwork was fake after buying it. He had been led to a link to an auction with the URL “banksy.co.uk/NFT.” The link showed a collectible entitled “Great Redistribution of the Climate Change Disaster was deleted after the auction. The auction finished early, and the fan bid 90 percent over other fans.
The fan paid close to $336,000 for a fake Banksy digital art. The British collector under the name Pranksy wanted to stay anonymous. Moreover, Pranksy was even more surprised when the hacker returned the entire amount save for the $5,000 transaction fee.
He said an anonymous person alerted him on Discord about the auction. He also said that the hacker might have been scared because Pranksy found out who he was and followed him on Twitter. Pranksy also recounts how the media was all over the NFT hack scam and might have pushed the hacker to return the money.
Although he is now $5,000 short, he says he’s still fortunate to get the rest of the amount back. He said he feels sorry for others in a similar situation, with the worst outcome of not getting a refund.
Scam or stunt?
While the fake link is already weird enough, others thought it was also highly bizarre that the scammer returned the money. People even speculated it was all part of a stunt.
However, Prof Paul Gough, an expert on Banksy art and Arts University Bournemouth principal and vice-chancellor, says it couldn’t have been.
For one, Banksy was recently busy with his “Spraycation” stunt, where he filmed 10 of his projects in East Anglia. And secondly, the artwork is a far cry from his stencil-inspired style.
