Fake Banksy Buys Fake Banksy

Let’s get right into it. Pranksy having a moment of self-fulfilling prophecy. In his early days, most of his works were mostly remixed versions of Banksy.

Banksy’s official website was exploited, with a pop up announcing an NFT auction on opensea. It didn’t take long for pranksy to ape in. He managed to outbid everyone by 87 ETH.

The artwork was listed as "Great Redistribution of the Climate Change Disaster" by a user called “gaakmann”. Interestingly “Brian S. Gaakman” is a pseudonym Banksy used back in 2018 for RA Summer Exhibition.

A Well Oiled Plan 🛢️

With the conviction and legitimacy from the site, Pranksy was….pranked. As an ardent fan of Banksy's artwork, he offered 100 ETH for the fake NFT. Within an hour, the seller accepted Pranksy’s bid and closed the auction, the page displaying the so-called “auction” on Banksy's site was also quickly taken down. Hinting to Pranksy that he might have been scammed.

It didn’t take that long for the story to achieve mainstream attention as a BBC reporter informed Pranksy that it was indeed a scam, and an article followed with a comment from Team Banksy “any Banksy NFT auctions are not affiliated with the artist in any shape or form”.

The icing on the Fake 

The hacker returned all of ETH. Pranksy reportedly believes he found the identity of the culprit, but he doesn’t want to reveal it as he got his ETH back.

There have been accusations on Twitter that this whole thing was a publicity stunt. Pranksy dusted and denied the accusation saying that he wouldn’t want to risk a possible future relationship with Banksy.

The Art Newspaper “Were Banksy and Pranksy both pranked in $330,000 NFT sale?

Takeaway: Always DYOR and be careful what you buy and what you ape into.