![]() The NFT art market exploded in 2021 to a valuation of $22 billion – up from $100 million a year earlier. If this vague sense of ownership makes you wonder why someone would want to pay so much money for it, it’s a bit more obvious why someone would steal art and try to pass it off as their own NFTs: There is big money in this. Unlike exchangeable blockchain products such as cryptocurrencies, NFTs are uniquely identifiable and theoretically owned by one person, although the NFT data itself can be shared and viewed by pretty much anyone. In short, NFTs are a piece of digital data that is distributed in a global network called a “blockchain”. (They were traced but found to keep the money.) But an army of IG followers coming to bat against global NFT platforms? Things have definitely become 21st century. Forgery and art fraud go back to the Renaissance, and even the great Michelangelo once painted a painting to pass off it as antique and increase its value. I sent him a direct DM and the account was deleted immediately.”Īll this is a very new take on an old problem. Luckily one of my followers was a close acquaintance of a rare founder and told me about his personal IG handle. Rebible did not respond to any of my official reporting on the help center on the site. Thanks to the support of my followers, two platforms shut down the scammer’s account. “I had to get help from my IG followers to solve the problem ASAP and get back to my routine. I couldn’t concentrate on making my art at all and was feeling very nervous,” Lee said. “The scammer uploaded about a hundred pieces of my artwork to OpenSea and Rarible-the biggest NFT platforms-and was trying to make money. However, the horrors of a theft force him to act. It’s very stressful to respond to every case.” “In most cases, I tell them to forget about it and ignore them because I don’t want to waste my time fighting with people online. “Almost every day I receive direct messages from my followers informing me that my artwork was used or monetized without my consent,” explained Lee via email from Seoul, where he currently In exhibit at the Muvoso Gallery. ![]() ![]() Now that’s like an ongoing game of digital whack-a-mole. Over the past several months, his works of bubblegum-fantasy-pop-surrealist-erotica have been repeatedly stolen by NFT scammers, who snatch screengrabs, alter them somewhat, then try to disguise them as their own. While most of us are baffled by what, exactly, NFTs are, for South Korean artist Joyce Lee, the rise of non-fungible tokens has been less of a mystery than a threat. As long as I keep creating art, this kind of art theft will never go away. Every morning, Joyce Lee says, she’s afraid to check her Instagram DMs “because I can read from someone that my art was stolen again. ![]()
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