The rapid growth of the unique NFT token sphere has attracted the attention of a huge number of scammers. The victim of the latter was Shepard Fairey, the artist who once created the poster for the campaign of former US President Barack Obama called «Hope.»
The day before, he said that some anonymous sold his work as an NFT and makes money on it. Faire tweeted that an unverified account with the nickname @obeygiantart is auctioning one of his works on the Rarible marketplace. At the same time, the signature of the real Fairey account on Twitter is @obeygiant, which means that the scammers are specifically trying to inspire the trust of users. Let’s talk about the situation in more detail.
NFT tokens are one of the key trends in the spring of 2021, which are based on a combination of the advantages of blockchain and art objects. A niche feature is the assignment to a specific object – be it a song by a famous artist or a painting by an artist – a unique token in a blockchain that cannot be changed. At the same time, the chain itself is transparent, which means that anyone can study its contents and make sure that a certain person owns an object.
What is especially important: the uniqueness of tokens is easy to verify, so it is impossible to purchase non-original work.
However, as practice shows, it is quite possible to steal someone else’s work and sell it in the form of a unique NFT token. However, in this case, the money for the sale will go not to the artist, but to the thief, who decided to appropriate someone else’s labor.
Cons of NFT tokens
This deception story is as old as the internet itself: after all, spoofing accounts have been a problem on Twitter and Facebook since the very beginning of social platforms. That is why blue-check systems were pioneered by the developers of such trading platforms. Their essence lies in the difference between real accounts and fake ones.
The Faerie Impostor was certainly inspired by an actual NFT artist that was released last month, Decrypt reports. Recall that against the backdrop of the hype, the Rarible platform has become one of the many NFT trading platforms that have gained immense popularity.
Rarible has its own verification system, so buying a fake NFT is, rather, a problem for the buyer himself. But confusion over digital product selling points to deeper issues surrounding the NFT craze and digital ownership. What really makes an NFT genuine? Is there something of value if you can just take a screenshot of the job? And how are legal copyright issues dealt with here?
Cheating «any member of the Rarible community» by impersonating another person is expressly prohibited by the site’s terms of service. The highest bid for a fake artist NFT is now just over $ 100. However, it is unclear if a potential buyer known as MarcoVHNFT knows that he is not acquiring the actual work.
We checked the actual data: the number of interactions with NFT tokens is near the all-time high. Moreover, most of them fall on the NBA Top Shot platform.
And although there are fewer and fewer mentions of NFT tokens in the media lately, the hype around the topic of non-fungible tokens has not yet faded away. Proof of this was the recent sale of work from former NSA employee Edward Snowden. Its NFT was acquired for the equivalent of $ 5.4 million, and the reason for the purchase was the similarity of the views of the author and the buyer.
We believe that this situation will not in any way affect the reputation of NFT tokens, which are specifically designed to fight counterfeiting. In this case, the blame for what happened lies with the employees of the trading platform, because it was they who did not verify the identity of the seller who was selling other people’s work. Obviously, in the future, this issue will be approached more carefully, so over time, such scenarios will become a thing of the past.
