A Banksy fan who thought he was buying the world-famous artist’s first-ever NFT was in fact sold a fake. 

The piece was sold through an online auction, created by a hacker through Banksy’s official website, with the auction ending after a British man outbid his nearest rivals by 90%.

A representative for Banksy told the BBC: “Any Banksy NFT auctions are not affiliated with the artist in any shape or form”.

An NFT, or ‘non-fungible token’, is a certificate indicating ownership of a digital asset or item. Over the last couple of years, NFTs have grown in popularity but remain a contentious topic as ‘ownership’ does not entitle the buyer the actual artwork or its copyright.

The hacker and operator of the fake auction has since returned all of the buyers money – minus the £5,000 transaction fee. 

The buyer, a prominent NFT collector who goes by the online moniker Pranksy who bought the supposed Banksy NFT, told the BBC in a message exchange on Twitter, that he believes he was the victim of an elaborate scam.

“The refund was totally unexpected, I think the press coverage of the hack plus the fact that I had found the hacker and followed him on Twitter may have pushed him into a refund.

“I feel very lucky when a lot of others in a similar situation with less reach would not have had the same outcome,” he said.

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The hacker had managed to create a new page on Banksy’s official site called NFT, which included a link to an auction site selling an NFT called Great Redistribution of the Climate Change Disaster.

After putting in his £244k bid, a number far above his nearest rivals, the funds were sent to the scammer in Ethereum, a cryptocurrency.

The buying, selling, and nature of NFT’s as art continues to make headlines in the tech world. 

This is latest in what has a been a year-long news cycle involving NFT’s, including the sale of original source code for the world wide web for a fee of $5.4 million.