NFT Collector Tricked into Buying Fake Banksy

2021-09-02 21:38

The fraudster has since returned the ill-gotten cash, less a "Transaction fee." But the incident has delivered an invaluable lesson on a whole new emerging cybersecurity threat: NFTs. In this instance the attacker hosted an auction on the real Banksy site, banksy.co.uk, for what was billed as the first-ever Bansky NFT, according to BBC. When a collector purchases an NFT, it doesn't give them ownership or copyright over the image itself.

An anonymous British collector the BBC identifies as "Prominent" and who goes by the name "Pranksy" was willing to offer 90 percent more than the next-highest bidder to score the Banksy NFT certificate.

The real Banksy had his team respond to the incident with a simple statement: "The artist Banksy has not created any NFT artworks," according to the BBC. Young-Sae Song from Bolster said it would have been hard for anyone to see signs this was a fake Banksy NFT auction.

"The fake Banksy NFT scam is one that would be difficult to detect for any cybersecurity technology, and it highlights the risk of purchasing NFTs, which do not have a centralized authentication method that is foolproof, as we saw in this scam," Song told Threatpost by email.

The Bolster research team also tracks emerging NFT scams and found the most popular cybercriminal tactics include setting up fake stores, the sale of fake art, Airdrop scams offering free crypto and brand impersonation on social media.

Hardly technical, most NFT scams rely on tricking the user into thinking they're buying the real deal.

News URL

https://threatpost.com/nft-collector-tricked-into-buying-fake-banksy/169179/