NFT Fraud on Rarible relies on transferring NFTs to celebs like Mark Cuban.

Just a few weeks ago, my wife and I ventured into the world of NFTs and decided to dip our toes and make our first NFT art purchase. We understood that we were entering the wild wild west and that there would be lots of learnings. We knew that we could be purchasing something that could easily go to ZERO value. But we knew that in order to understand how NFTs work, we would need to start somewhere and participate in the NFT economy directly.

So, we decided to mitigate the risks in the following ways:

1. Use a reputable NFT marketplace — Rarible
2. Use a reputable Crypto Wallet — Coinbase Wallet
3. Buy from a ruputable and ‘verified’ creator — KAWS
4. Follow the lead of famous NFT owners — Mark Cuban

So…we decided to buy this Kaws NFT for about $250 USD plus $80 in gas.

Black BFFxNFT from Kaws on Rarible

Purchase

We celebrated our purchase and made sure to check our Coinbase Wallet and saw it sitting in the wallet. We then checked EtherScan to confirm that the blockchain has a record of our purchase! For $80 in gas it better have an immutable record!

But then a few days later we noticed that the item was missing from the Wallet. I immediately checked our Rarible account and there was no sign of it there either! We then searched Rarible for Kaws and nothing! I checked MCuban’s items…again nothing! But if you scan his Activity Feed you will see the following items do appear.

But when you click them-again NADA!

I then reached out to Mark Cuban directly and he confirmed that he didn’t actually purchase these NFTs. Rather, the owner of the fake Kaws account transferred the NFTs to MCuban’s Wallet. SNEAKY!

This tactic gave the appearance of credibility and was a contributing factor to why we bought this NFT in the first place! We got duped!

So I decided to enter the Rarible Telegram channel to speak with someone from their support team. What happened next was super shady! I received a message from Rarible support on Telegram telling me to simply “Re-integrate” my wallet by clicking on a link. The link took me to a nice look page merely asking for my Wallet’s Seed Phrase and Private Key! A novice could easily have fallen for this phishing scam and accidentally granted full access to their crypto wallet to an online scammer. Luckily I knew better.

I then discovered that Rarible has a support email and messaged them only to find out the following:

And that was that. NO REFUND. NO RECOURSE. NO NOTHING!

I was not the only person to make my purchase decision based on the “Verified Check Mark” on the Kaws account.

Now I understand that Rarible is a new company with good intentions. They are even structuring themselves as a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization). And they recently raised $1.75M to do achieve their aims.

But this does not mean that they shouldn’t apologize and rectify the losses caused by their mistake. They verified a fraudulent account and real people lost real money on this basis. I hope that Rarible does the right thing and rights this wrong.

OR — I invite Kaws to mint an official NFT and reward the early buyers of this fake NFT with a free token. That would make for some cool PR too!

BUYER BEWARE — NFT Fraud is rampant

What other counterfeit items are allowed to flourish on Rarible you ask? Well just follow the trail of Mark Cuban or Lindsay Lohan and you may find out. Here is one from “BillieElish (TM)” that is most likely fake. I’m getting official confirmation of this from her team. However, this account does not have the Verified check mark that Kaws had so its a little more sketch.