1. What do you mean precisely by "backdoor print"?

2. When encouraging someone to find a backdoor print on eBay, how would you advise that they distinguish them from the untold knockoffs and counterfeits?

Looking for an unsigned banksy as a present for someone getting married.

They have morons already but anything else would be of interest.

I'd prefer to meet up in London and do a face to face so I can inspect the print.

Coa a must.

Pm me if you have anything and the price you're after for it. We have a budget of around 3.5k.

Cheers!

Great question, as a newbie would love to see an answer  ..   From what I've read in the past 24 hours, I think I'm [now] going to stick to something that can get a COA ! 

Also looking for an unsigned Victoria - saw one for around 4000 GBP - reasonable ? 

Anyone who's new here and considering a purchase must be made fully aware that, without a certificate of authenticity from Pest Control (which specifies a print's details, including its edition number), you have absolutely no guarantee that a print is a bona fide Banksy.

Believe me when I say I've seen more counterfeit Banksy prints in my time than I care to recall, and many were quite convincing — in one case having fooled an embarrassed dealer. There are also plenty of members on this forum who've had the regrettable experience of purchasing counterfeits, sold to them with falsified provenance documentation before COAs were the norm. I've liaised with more than a dozen such members.

Frankly, most prints by Banksy are easy to fake. Rest assured as well that any capable screenprinter could produce near-identical duplicate screens from genuine prints.

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With the establishment of Pest Control in 2008 and the crucial safety net it offered, fraudsters in the Banksy market found it necessary to shift their focus. It became far more difficult for them to sell counterfeit signed and unsigned editioned prints. So they moved into the grey areas where Pest Control doesn't opine, as is the case with so-called backdoor prints — either:

(i) churning out new ones to pass off as genuine backdoor prints; or

(ii) using up previously-printed stock which (if Pest Control had not disrupted that lucrative market through its COAs) might otherwise have been given fake embossed stamps, numbered, and offloaded as genuine editioned prints.

The profits are smaller when on-selling or producing counterfeit backdoor prints. However, because they're outside the realm which Pest Control sets for itself, the advantage for fraudsters is that no one with the requisite authority calls them out. This means there's little risk of getting caught, let alone going to prison. All you need is a suitably convincing backstory (real or fabricated), a gift of the gab, and a conspiracy of silence and complicity by other people here who really should know better.

And, hey, if you've also managed to find or to fake an email exchange with some ex-Mission Print or POW printer or one of their mates, then super. Conveniently, that very same email could be printed out repeatedly and re-used with other buyers — to dump, say, 10, 20 or 50 more counterfeits onto the already seedy backdoor-print market.

When you have credulous buyers who desperately want to believe that a backstory is true, the efforts needed to con them are minimised, and the selling work is pretty much done for you.

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Consequently, those who consider dodginess to be an attractive feature should definitely look into backdoor prints.

A purchase will result in one of two outcomes:

1. Quite probably, you'll end up spending your money on a counterfeit, like the many novices or fools who buy colour photocopies of Di-Faced Tenner notes on eBay.

2. In the best-case scenario, you'll end up with a real, unofficial, non-authorised backdoor print — deceitfully produced and released without the approval of either Pictures On Walls or Banksy. In other words, you'll end up with stolen property. It goes without saying that this raises certain ethical issues.

And of course the stolen property won't ever be authenticated by Pest Control. So the only comfort you'll have as to its genuineness will be a believable or not-so-believable tale that came from a thief. Or a story invented further down the line by some intermediary whose own moral flexibility allows them to handle and deal in stolen goods.

Presumably, they'll be like the kind of people who sell used smartphones or television sets outside of pubs. No doubt those chaps are also "true gents" and a good laugh as well.