I told before that there will be a video , but nobody is listening to meeeeee ! 🤧 

Video also available to watch on the Banksy website

And he won his appeal at court against that card company so a great month for the guy !

Let the speculation start! 😂

"BANKSY original STENCIL ukraine
Time left: 4d 11h|Saturday, 00:05
Current bid: £48.00[ 9 bids ]
Located in: Birmingham, United Kingdom"

www.ebay.co.uk/itm/275554288903

I smell a rat Mr Silk

If that is real that's 60k - 100k based on the stencil of a toxic rat that sold at Juliens for 60k odd

The only way someone would have the real stencil is from B himself or they got really fudging lucky and went to Ukraine and found it plus I messaged the seller asking how she got it and no reply

Too good to be true

Located in: Birmingham, United Kingdom

Just one look at her feedback screaming 'scammer 'is a pretty good indication its fake

Why do you post so much nonsense all the time ??

It was not you i was posting about you Roy

But if the cap fits, wear it 🤣

Currently at £316 with 9 hours to go.
I wonder what it would go for if the location was set as in the Ukraine?

Some poor sod won it for £2250

This type of straightforward due-diligence check is indeed helpful.

But it's also secondary, because what it serves to corroborate should already be evident, at least to anyone with a functional pair of eyes who bothered to examine a detailed photo of the Banksy mural in Borodyanka. And even among the visually impaired, to anyone with common sense.

Zero proper knowledge is therefore actually required to conclude that the eBay stencil is a counterfeit listed by some scammer under the username, lizzie.bee.123.



There might well have been complicit shill bidders who participated in the auction. Or, if we're lucky, a saboteur who placed a stupidly-high winning bid to protect others from themselves.

Sadly, however, what we still have among the remaining eBay bidders are fools. Including those who may have been blinkered by wishful thinking, FOMO and/or greed.



If the sale completes and money changes hands, £2,250.00 plus postage will, for the buyer, turn into an expensive lesson. Regrettable, given one could have hoped that its teaching ("Lesson 1: Don't be a dupe.") would be unnecessary.


__________


As a separate aside, the emphasis this message board places on eBay is unfortunate in my opinion.

But if anyone feels that a particular eBay sale is significant and really does merit being discussed, I would once again* encourage them to post both the link and a screenshot.

Since completed listings are generally taken down by eBay after three months, hyperlinks to eBay auctions quickly become dead links. Making the effort of adding one or two screenshots thus helps to ensure the relevant post (or even the entire thread) can remain informative for years to come.

Please also identify and type the name or username of any dishonest seller into your post, so they have a chance of later popping up as red flags in Google-search results.



www.ebay.co.uk/itm/BANKSY-original-STENCIL-ukraine-/275554288903


Fake stencil listing (eBay item no. 275554288903) by lizzie.bee.123, possibly based in Birmingham, UK














Bidding history for the fake stencil







Seller feedback for lizzie.bee.123





9 September 2022 sale by lizzie.bee.123 of a "Banksy Helicopter"

I'd love to know whether the original piece has hands behind the broken pieces of wall. Seems odd to not to include the hands in the stencil, no?

At the risk of labouring the point and giving the eBay fraud far more attention than it deserves, below is a handful of images juxtaposing the Borodyanka gymnast piece with the counterfeit stencil by lizzie.bee.123.



Irrespective of the slightly different angles of the side-by-side images, note the rather glaring tells with the fake stencil, including:

(i)  its less-detailed nature;

(ii)  some incorrect proportions; and

(iii)  when producing the counterfeit based on photos of the Borodyanka mural, clear confusion by lizzie.bee.123 between (a) the painted areas created by Banksy's stencil, and (b) those resulting from underspray, freehand-spraying, and the uneven surface of the wall.


Once again, knowledge of Banksy's artwork isn't required to quickly identify the eBay stencil as a fake, and lizzie.bee.123 as a fraudster. Viewers just need to use their observational skills.



COMPARE AND CONTRAST:













__________



Efforts here to provoke reactions from other forum members are, generally speaking, fair enough. Even when those efforts sometimes feel a little tiresome, like clickbait.

But the posting of patently fraudulent eBay listings seems problematic, specifically when accompanied by open-ended, "Is this real or fake? What do you think?"-style commentary.

There is an unhelpful ambiguity to these posts — unhelpful at least for some of our fellow members who might be young, inexperienced, ignorant, naive, inattentive and/or simply foolish. They could fail to appreciate the questions being asked may be rhetorical or less-than-sincere. And that any express calls for speculation about the authenticity of a piece may be motivated simply by a desire to promote increased engagement on this message board.



When we (and we senior forum members in particular) are coy about obviously-scam eBay listings, rather than categoric and definitive from the outset, the danger is that we risk unintentionally conferring upon those listings a veneer of possible legitimacy.

That in turn could make us complicit if any wishful thinkers among us are later defrauded.

I do not believe this concern to be unreasonable.