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?

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[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.

[dothebeats]

Other NFTs that are not works of art, I will understand reaching such prices. But for the jpg NFT market? I have lots of doubts. I mean, what prevents anyone from creating their own multi-million pixel NFT nowadays? They can pair it with some preposterous claims about the origin of the NFT then bam, value is created out of nowhere. As what one user mentioned here, this sale is a perfect example of money laundering through NFTs. It's the next level of idiocy but hey, if it works, it works.

[ene1980]

So what does it even mean, that the highest bid was just to attract everyone. They need to send out the fees which will not be that huge considering they shelled out $69 million to create the hype around the NFT market. I know that some of these things are stupid and even i was thinking why would anyone shell out millions for stupid digital art when they can do everything in the world that has some meaning .

[EdenHazard]

So what does it even mean, that the highest bid was just to attract everyone. They need to send out the fees which will not be that huge considering they shelled out $69 million to create the hype around the NFT market. I know that some of these things are stupid and even i was thinking why would anyone shell out millions for stupid digital art when they can do everything in the world that has some meaning .

well collectible thing always had its value, sometimes it is about satisfaction ... and for those people who have too much money, they often spend money on stupid things just try to not get bored.
this just remind me on netflix serial called squid game,  a group of rich people get bored and created crazy game for the sake of satisfaction.

but this NFT thing way more complicated, the vision of NFT itself is really really great, but there is always an obstacle and write off the good instention of NFT invention. f*ckk them and we just moving on.

[hatshepsut93]

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.

It's not clean crypto is government can investigate it and find that the buyer and seller are connected and that the money involved were dirty. Fine art is used for money laundering and NFT can be used too, but this method is very far from perfect. Big criminals invest in legitimate business that generates clean profit so that their actions raise minimum suspicion.

[worle1bm]

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

Who knew there was collusion at the OverPriced JPG market?

The NFT trend is at most of the hype this time nothing else and people are spending millions for just a single piece of monkey only.They just want to remain popular in the market and as said money laundering is also being conducted through this trend.Why would anyone spend $69 million for just a jpeg file whereas high quality projects are unable to raise funds for the project.But still we see people usually prefer to be part of the hype whatever it costs.

[Tytanowy Janusz]

It's not clean crypto is government can investigate it and find that the buyer and seller are connected and that the money involved were dirty. Fine art is used for money laundering and NFT can be used too, but this method is very far from perfect. Big criminals invest in legitimate business that generates clean profit so that their actions raise minimum suspicion.

I think its much easier to connect a real legitimate business with scam activity if balance sheet does not match (huge amount of money out of nowhere, deposits from shady bank accounts or margin significantly exceeding industry standards) rather than 2 random ETH addresses. Especially now, in 2021, when this technology is so new that governments has not developed technology and regulations to detect and prove in court that someone is guilty. Especially if someone knows what he is doing and we are talking about < x mln $ scam.

[Kong Hey Pakboy]

So what does it even mean, that the highest bid was just to attract everyone. They need to send out the fees which will not be that huge considering they shelled out $69 million to create the hype around the NFT market. I know that some of these things are stupid and even i was thinking why would anyone shell out millions for stupid digital art when they can do everything in the world that has some meaning .

That's the most likely reason or that they overpriced and overhyped the product so they can make as much profit as possible, this isn't anything new, most art dealers and auction house do this so they can inflate the prices artificially and the owner of the product gets more benefit.

[bussybuddy]

Artistic NFTs with such great value are truly absurd in value, and perhaps we all see the hype. I think that if not clarified, this is not an issue that receives much attention, because money laundering or PR tricks will apply.

[ivankoh]

In fact, the art NFTs are an abstraction that has multiple theoretical meanings and is endless in value. As evidenced by an NFT monkey sold for 2M1$, it has become the most expensive NFT work on the Solana ecosystem. Lol, a lot of interesting things in NFT showed many surprises.
But with a different story, it can completely contain tricks with many literal meanings.

[fiulpro]

Now what they did is similar to what big business companies do usually, they generally try and overprice their products by using such strategies of strategies similar to these therefore what the guy did was honestly not just a scam but also he unfortunately stained the NFT industry, now people are not just going to be more aware but at the same time some might decide to ward off from them.
The whole point is, if you do a thing like that, you generally ruin the image of the whole industry alongside your company as well, therefore I do hope that in the future people can have better options to investigate the meaningless and super high value themselves before making any decisions.
The whole point would be to :
1. Investigate
2. Be extra careful
3. Have an idea about pricing things according to their value.
4. Learn to tackle such scams using blockchain technology.

[MNbag]

If you need to actively promote your investments, that ain't a good investment.

Good investments often speak for themselves.

They don't need a PR team.

[Dragonfund]

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

Who knew there was collusion at the OverPriced JPG market?

NFTs aren't something I have never been in support, it's just another scheme of crypto that would soon end and be forgotten and the surprising thing now is that celebrities have taking to the next level of minting for fans in exchange for their finance. I know how valuable art work can be sometimes but I would rather have a hold of two btc than buy an NFT art of $90k, that is foolishness.
The last time, snoop dog was something called metaverse and was making all the crypto media and I just wondering what people are thinking.
Don't be surprised when SEC start going after them the moment the NFT frenzy start to cool off.

[justdimin]

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

Who knew there was collusion at the OverPriced JPG market?

I would say this "partnership" is not as bad as it sounds. When I first heard they were partners I assumed they just made a fake money movement, like "I will pay 69 million dollars for your NFT and then you will pay it back to me, that way we both get famous and nobody loses any money" type of deal.

However it is not like that, they are just partners in business and they share marketing between each other and then the income from it as well. This is sort of understandable because of how the crypto world works, I personally believe that marketing should be done in bunches, as a whole community, it would make things a lot easier for people.

[ven7net]

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

Who knew there was collusion at the OverPriced JPG market?

And you know, I'm not surprised that it all happened. I have been making money over the Internet for a very long time and have been able to see many different fraudulent schemes during this time, so why can't they be with NFT? Of course, they are and will be everywhere, and it is important to know about this for everyone who is going to deal with this or that asset. Moreover, everything that we can see now, everything is created and launched with one goal, to earn as much and faster as possible, that's all.

[wxa7115]

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.

I agree with this, it will be one thing if a person had one million dollars in cryptocurrencies and they wanted to spend that money without telling the government, in that case the government will without a doubt investigate that person to the best of their abilities, but what we are talking about here is that those people are using the market of NFTs to try to legalize that money.

So they are trying to launder their money and make it clean by paying taxes and by creating a transaction to make it seem legitimate, and while it could seem suspicious I have no doubt that many government agencies are not going to ask any questions as long as they can tax that transaction in full.

[agg2702]

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.

when looking at this case it is true what you say and it will be very easy to launder money in this way especially since it is something that is quite cheap for gas there and indeed when doing this there are several advantages they get.
apart from what you said in money laundering, this will also be a bit of a strategy to engage the next investors.
but unknowingly things like this can affect the image of NFT which is currently booming. and maybe they don't care about it.

[Tytanowy Janusz]

but unknowingly things like this can affect the image of NFT which is currently booming. and maybe they don't care about it.

They don't care. Just like ICO scammers did not care in 2017 about destroying one of the best inventions in economy we had in last century - create a company, collect millions from investors all around the globe in a fair way by giving back "shares" that can be easily traded right away. In a matter of 1 hour without leaving your home. This was huge. No one use it now only because 99/100 of projects are scams so that this 1/100 will have to spend millions for marketing to be more visible than those 99 scammers which made it one of the most expensive way of collecting founds for legit businesses.

But so far this big trades (money laundering trades) are in fact bringing all the hype into NFT. Most of people speculate them because they hope to sell it for millions just like XYZ nft was sold last day (which was money laundering trade).

[GubiMixa1292]

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

Who knew there was collusion at the OverPriced JPG market?

The truth behind the people who buy and sell NFTs are money launderers, it's ironic and funny not to know which works can sell for real millions of dollars. I suspect that behind those auction transactions is a conspiracy of a money launderer and they only do this by converting those funds into NFT then auctioning them into legal money to evade the law. 

[wxa7115]

but unknowingly things like this can affect the image of NFT which is currently booming. and maybe they don't care about it.

They don't care. Just like ICO scammers did not care in 2017 about destroying one of the best inventions in economy we had in last century - create a company, collect millions from investors all around the globe in a fair way by giving back "shares" that can be easily traded right away. In a matter of 1 hour without leaving your home. This was huge. No one use it now only because 99/100 of projects are scams so that this 1/100 will have to spend millions for marketing to be more visible than those 99 scammers which made it one of the most expensive way of collecting founds for legit businesses.

But so far this big trades (money laundering trades) are in fact bringing all the hype into NFT. Most of people speculate them because they hope to sell it for millions just like XYZ nft was sold last day (which was money laundering trade).

It is depressing how scammers or in this case money launderers are destroying yet another good idea, when I first heard of NFTs I thought the idea had some potential but it is obvious scammers and money launderers thought the same albeit in a different way.

Now the market of NFTs is completely inflated with sales which are not real, they are just buying their own NFTs in order to legalize the funds they got through shady means, and instead of understanding this people see this and they want to be part of it and that is when they become victims of the scammers waiting for them or they try to sell their own NFTs and no one is interested in buying them.

[timerland]

I see a lot of people who have millions locked up in NFTs thinking that it's liquid wealth.

It's not. The exact same reason why NFTs are able to appreciate so much in value over a short period of time means that the entire market can silently crash overnight as well.

If these wash traders stop pumping up prices all of a sudden, you could price your NFTs at sky high values and no one will bat an eye at you.

[coupable]

I see a lot of people who have millions locked up in NFTs thinking that it's liquid wealth.

It's not. The exact same reason why NFTs are able to appreciate so much in value over a short period of time means that the entire market can silently crash overnight as well.

If these wash traders stop pumping up prices all of a sudden, you could price your NFTs at sky high values and no one will bat an eye at you.

I don't see your reason on why someone should hide from eyes at first place. It is good for the better for the community to spot all strange moves and have that common critical sense.
It's not necessarly a way to money-lundering like the example mentioned in op. Anyone can create fake trade history (sell his works to himself) for camouflage to convince new comers that his works are valuable and a great investment opportunity. I recently read that OpenSea marketplace is in its way to develop [AI Based] app that can valorise the works and set a reasonable pricing .

[wxa7115]

I see a lot of people who have millions locked up in NFTs thinking that it's liquid wealth.

It's not. The exact same reason why NFTs are able to appreciate so much in value over a short period of time means that the entire market can silently crash overnight as well.

If these wash traders stop pumping up prices all of a sudden, you could price your NFTs at sky high values and no one will bat an eye at you.

This is a risk they are taking they do not know it is there, when it comes to coins like bitcoin that are freely traded you know that even if there is manipulation going on it is impossible for a silent crash to happen, everything is on the open as every single transaction sends a pricing signal to the rest of the market participants.


But this is not true in the case of NFTs, if a NFT sells for a high price that does not mean the NFT you are holding will do the same, since they are not fungible no one knows the true value of what they are selling and buying and each person is using their best judgment in order to try to figure this out, but as soon as new money runs out then the majority of those coins will crash in price almost immediately, but most will not notice and they will only do so once they try to sell and there is no one there to buy at any price.