Fake Banksy NFT sold through artist's website for $336,000

A hacker has returned $336,000 to a British collector after tricking him into buying a fake Bansky NFT, which was advertised through the artist's official website.

The man who is in his 30s says the hacker returned all the money except for the transaction fee of around £5,000 on Monday evening.

A link to an online auction for the NFT called Great Redistribution of the Climate Change Disaster appeared on a now-deleted page of banksy.co.uk.

The British collector offered 90 percent more than rival bidders, ending the auction early with the payment in cryptocurrency Ethereum sent to the scammer.

The Banksy fan who got duped says he thought he was buying the world-famous graffiti artist's first-ever NFT.

But Banksy's team pointed out that the NFT auctions are not affiliated with the artist.

The man said he was alerted to the auction on the social network Discord.

The buyer suspects the person who alerted him and others to the Banksy NFT sale may have been the hacker themselves.

Tom Robinson, a cryptocurrency analyst from Elliptic, confirmed that cryptocurrency is irreversibly transferred upon bid placement on the auction platform OpenSea.