The $69m NFT buyer & seller were partners

[MNbag]

https://mailchi.mp/brianlivingston.com/034-2#free1

Who knew there was collusion at the OverPriced JPG market?

[Tytanowy Janusz]

Most of big NFT trades are simply money laundering [*1] or just a way to find next big investor by creating a trading history.

[*1] You have 1 mln $ of dirty money stolen from exchange hack, rugpull or ICO exit scam? All you need to do is create a shitty picture, create NFT out of it using different ETH address and buy it using dirty money from first ETH address. Now you have clean money earned by selling NFT on 1 ETH address, you can pay tax from and spend. And NFT worth 1 mln $ (based on trade history) on other account.

So it does not surprise me at all that 1 trade was set up.

[stompix]

Wow, I'm shocked, surprised, stupefied, stunned, startled, and full of sarcasm 
Another auction that proves to be completely fake, wow!

People really believed that out of the blew millions will be spent on those NFT, most of them are either laundering money, pumping one NFT price in one collection to draw others to buy the other 100 rock pictures for thousands of dollars, or to drive the "artist" NFT price up.

Now imagine the guy who would have spent million for real for another piece of the same artist reading this!
Just like with paintings, you buy a picture worth 1 million knowing that others have sold for billions in total and then you receive the news that actually you're the only person who has bought one for real, the others being fake and nobody besides you has ever b paid real money for a painting of that artist. And that all of them are actually worth their value as doormats.

[Hydrogen]

Jack Dorsey made the better market play. He "sold" his NFT for almost 3 million. A more reasonable and believable sum than $69 million. The famous Mona Lisa painting has been appraised as being worth $100 million. Pricing NFTs at $69 million, close to 70% of the Mona Lisa's value. Is too ambitious a sale to be believable.

Sellers buying their own property, to artificially inflate market values of their holdings, also happens with collectibles and art in other markets. Its been a common trend for many years.

The way it works is, an investor might buy up all of the nintendo SNES cartridges still in the box in mint condition, they can find. Then they sell some of the cartridges on ebay or another exchange at an inflated price. Which allows them to unload all of the cartridges they had been HODLing at far higher prices than they paid for them. Basically what Martin Shkreli did with pharmaceutical drugs, before he landed himself in prison.

[hamdi]

thats clear from break of news

[The Sceptical Chymist]

Just like with paintings, you buy a picture worth 1 million knowing that others have sold for billions in total and then you receive the news that actually you're the only person who has bought one for real, the others being fake and nobody besides you has ever b paid real money for a painting of that artist. And that all of them are actually worth their value as doormats.

Heh heh.  That would be an eye-opener for sure.

I'm glad I'm not the only one here who thinks the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.  Right after learning about what NFTs are, the immediate thought I had was that these things are complete and utter wastes of money--it's like investing in digital comic books or baseball cards.  Even if these works of art are unique on a blockchain, they're still digital.  If you want to hang them on your wall, you'd have to print them out, which is basically something anyone could do.  So what's the point of owning them, much less paying these outrageous prices.

The only stuff I could find on Youtube about NFTs are hype videos, and I didn't have the patience to scroll through search results long enough to find any that were truly skeptical of them.  It's amazing, really amazing, how stupid people can be.

Oh yeah, it's also not surprising they're a vehicle for money laundering.  I never suspected that was going on, but it would account for the prices some of these turds are selling for.

[wxa7115]

Most of big NFT trades are simply money laundering [*1] or just a way to find next big investor by creating a trading history.

[*1] You have 1 mln $ of dirty money stolen from exchange hack, rugpull or ICO exit scam? All you need to do is create a shitty picture, create NFT out of it using different ETH address and buy it using dirty money from first ETH address. Now you have clean money earned by selling NFT on 1 ETH address, you can pay tax from and spend. And NFT worth 1 mln $ (based on trade history) on other account.

So it does not surprise me at all that 1 trade was set up.

NFTs are becoming the perfect vehicle to launder money, some hackers for what I know did this with apps, but apps are cheap so they needed to generate a lot of small transactions in order to launder their money and make it legal.

However now a hacker can create a NFT, sell it for an outrageous price and if anyone is suspicious about the high value the NFT was sold for they can argue that since value is on the eye of the beholder then the buyer just decided to buy it for a high price, and there is no way to argue against that as the world of art is full of instances like this.

[24Kt]

Most of big NFT trades are simply money laundering [*1] or just a way to find next big investor by creating a trading history.

[*1] You have 1 mln $ of dirty money stolen from exchange hack, rugpull or ICO exit scam? All you need to do is create a shitty picture, create NFT out of it using different ETH address and buy it using dirty money from first ETH address. Now you have clean money earned by selling NFT on 1 ETH address, you can pay tax from and spend. And NFT worth 1 mln $ (based on trade history) on other account.

So it does not surprise me at all that 1 trade was set up.

NFTs are becoming the perfect vehicle to launder money, some hackers for what I know did this with apps, but apps are cheap so they needed to generate a lot of small transactions in order to launder their money and make it legal.

However now a hacker can create a NFT, sell it for an outrageous price and if anyone is suspicious about the high value the NFT was sold for they can argue that since value is on the eye of the beholder then the buyer just decided to buy it for a high price, and there is no way to argue against that as the world of art is full of instances like this.

And with the negative news arising from NFT industry, these will create negative perception again from non crypto users' point of view. Thinking that crypto market is really full of scam. The idea of NFT industry is great, if it is used in legit way. But scammers will always find a way how to utilize this industry to cover up their illegal activities. And I guess, laundering money is one on this. For buyers, just do your homework first before buying an expensive NFT item. It may not be worth in the future.

[sikke]

Surprise surprise!  

I believe in the idea of NFTs. But I definitely do not believe in AI generated art that can be infinitely reproduced having any value over a few cents.

The market is saturated with these and people seem to be going berserk for them still. The irrationality will fade sooner or later, although timing the market is always impossible.

[dkbit98]

I said it from start that all this NFT craze was just one more scam and manipulation to pump prices of jpeg images, and that doesn't mean that all of them are scam, but ones that sell for millions are just like that.
It could be a good idea for some clubs to have NFT but all market is wild west and people can lose money much easier than investing in Bitcoin.
This money laundering phase wil lbe over soon and then we shall move to something else after altcoins, ICOs and NFTs.

[Kittygalore]

What would you expect, this is the new Fine Arts, people will definitely do some shady businesses in that place so it's not surprising plus, there's different people in the NFT space, there are those that want to create a community and there are those that want to create a quick buck.

[so98nn]

And this was the start of story where NFTs took best turn of their life. I think few things are getting popular because of the trade histories now a days. Peeps saw big potential in NFT because of this specific news of JPG art getting sold at 69 mln.

Moreover, this started the era of NFT and lot of artist started getting into the race. Big platforms were Made and being launched even today to copy right your artwork in the form of NFT.

I think, though it’s a fake news, the results were astounding. I see this as win-win situation. 

[Ucy]

Whether this is true or not I don't know, but it's a possibility. That could also explain why meaningless arts are overpriced. But I think the Twitter's old post NFT may be worth the price though.

[mu_enrico]

Aside from money laundering, "they" can be just one person pretending to be a buyer and seller. Who knows?
One can just create 10 addresses/accounts and pretending to trade an NFT back and forth, so it looks like a hot NFT. The last person who bought this NFT is just a gullible noob.

[hatshepsut93]

Now you have clean money earned by selling NFT on 1 ETH address, you can pay tax from and spend. And NFT worth 1 mln $ (based on trade history) on other account.

So it does not surprise me at all that 1 trade was set up.

I doubt that the government is so stupid to actually get fooled by something like this. Like you have a guy who is friends with drug dealers or other criminals, and he declared $$ milions in profits from selling an NFT, of course someone will start investigating this deal.

The complex scheme with manipulating some secondary tokens is more realistic than plainly using NFT to launder money. And also NFTs are good for making pump and dump schemes.

[Tytanowy Janusz]

I doubt that the government is so stupid to actually get fooled by something like this. Like you have a guy who is friends with drug dealers or other criminals, and he declared $$ milions in profits from selling an NFT, of course someone will start investigating this deal.

The complex scheme with manipulating some secondary tokens is more realistic than plainly using NFT to launder money. And also NFTs are good for making pump and dump schemes.

You have clean crypto from selling NFT. What can government do? Say that its impossible that you sold nft for 100k$ (for instance). Well I know people who get 20k$ from ... bounty program in 2017. I get 1500$ from 1inch aidrop. This guy get 2 mln $ from uniswap aidrop - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5276637.0 Everything is possible here. I doubt that government will stop someone from taxing 1 mln $ earned from selling NFT.

And also NFTs are good for making pump and dump schemes.

How to do pump and dump on NFT if NFT is a 1 item only.

[Fesatmas]

Again, NFT is used as a means to do things that exceed Cryptocurrency expectations, where this is only an uncertain foam. Look at NFT which is currently becoming quite unreasonable some people can trade off other people's NFT work and avoid investigation.
In this way it is much more than money laundering, but also a deception. I know that currently there are many quality NFT but not a few who are just taking advantage.

Since it's about trends, we have to be able to neutralize things that just don't have long term benefits.

[RapTarX]

Wow, I'm shocked, surprised, stupefied, stunned, startled, and full of sarcasm 

It's not a new news. It has been discussed and forecasted long ago. That's very possible. Justin Sun had tried to bid for that auction but for some reason he couldn’t. I don’t know the exact reason though.
Anyway, that was a great read and an example of how project can be well documented & presented that investors may have no fucking idea its a scam.
If anyone is interested, you can check it out and leanr more about this- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=418416.msg56598258#msg56598258

[stompix]

How to do pump and dump on NFT if NFT is a 1 item only.

Not all of them are single stand-alone NFTs, and with collections, it's pretty simple to pump the price.
https://fortune.com/2021/08/27/etherrock-nfts-worth-millions/
You need somebody to buy one for 100k and then a lot will try their luck for smaller sums or even go over that bid, just wait for the fish to bite, just like with cryptokitties.

For single pieces, the deal is pretty simple just like with the fake auctions on physical arts like paintings or statues..
You buy one for 1 million, then you auction it again and your associate will raise it to 5 million. Then again an auction and this time everyone who has seen this increasing value will try his luck, maybe he will get it for cheap and ends up buying for a bargain since the starting price is just 500k, 10% of the "value" and he is winning the bid with just 1 mil. He is happy when thinking he has bought something worth 5 million with 1  but in reality, he has just bought an overpriced item that was never actually worth even 1 cent. It's a pump and a dump in the account of the one falling for that trick.

[Gyfts]

Now you have clean money earned by selling NFT on 1 ETH address, you can pay tax from and spend. And NFT worth 1 mln $ (based on trade history) on other account.

So it does not surprise me at all that 1 trade was set up.

I doubt that the government is so stupid to actually get fooled by something like this. Like you have a guy who is friends with drug dealers or other criminals, and he declared $$ milions in profits from selling an NFT, of course someone will start investigating this deal.

The complex scheme with manipulating some secondary tokens is more realistic than plainly using NFT to launder money. And also NFTs are good for making pump and dump schemes.

You underestimate how incompetent government is, then. This happens on a much smaller scale than the 69 million dollar headline you might see. You can use NFT's to transfer whatever level of wealth you want and the government couldn't step in if they wanted to. Any shit coin is a good pump and dump scheme, and most governments don't regulate those at all.