So let’s get this straight, you are sure these have nothing to do with Tate Ward right ?

But, you have sold a fake and Tate Ward have sold multiples fakes of the same thing.

This sounds very fishy.

The fact that Nick and Tate Ward have been selling fakes on an industrial scale, doesn't mean no one else has sold fake Banksy's, including fakes of this poster

sold

This is just getting worse and worse, Tate Ward have no shame. I think it’s best you ring the police, I think it’s best everyone rings the police. This is fraud on a BIG scale.

urbanartassociation.com/thread/156848/petrol-bomb-sale

He refunded on both prints ?

Another angle to ponder Returning a print that is not the same condition as sent the seller could assume it has been swapped over For a fake .

And as another member raised , why when returned marked at high value when bought low ?

Great forum support there Jedi ..why are you trying to isolate him from a support network?

have you called them yet ?

Dive Jedi, have you ever sold through Tate Ward ?

One would assume so
I think many have also sold through Tate ward and opening up an official complaint may open up a can of worms which may include past items the individuals may have sold through them hence the reluctance to instigate a police complaint ?

If notice people still use Tate ward auctions final sold prices when advertising Their private works for sale , as they are usually the highest achieved amounts In the market for certain items
Hence in their interest for the auction house to
Continue as is

When did you pay £1000 for the poster?

Think safe to say anyone dealing with Tate Ward / Lobster / Danny needs their head testing going forward.

Should definitely involve fire . . .

I wanted to take the opportunity to update this thread and also make some general points regarding Tate Ward.

I understand people have been looking for answers and feedback here, what we have been doing is contacting and indeed speaking to the people who have been directly affected by this issue. As opposed to people who have not been directly affected and in some cases who are simply posting with the sole intention of attempting to damage Tate Ward's reputation. A good example of this is of course the "member" who started this thread in the first place. A new member with around 16 posts all on the Tate Ward thread's. Probably a competitor, gallery or maybe who has an axe to grind. I will leave others to judge the the true motivation of this and other similar members posts, but to me it is very clear. We will not explain or justify ourselves to people who create accounts purely to try to damage our reputation.

On a number of occasions the police have been mentioned and bearing in mind both Tate Ward and Nick have a very clear audit trail as to where the Tesco Petrol's have come from the police were contacted at a early stage. We have spoken to Ray Swann of the Metropolitan Police Art and Antiques Unit. Obviously this is a public forum as such we cannot into full detail here. However that situation may change in the future, if/when it does I will again update members.

What I can say is that we are confident that we have contacted everyone who has have been affected by the above issue. A few haven’t responded yet, we will continue to try to contact these buyers. Not all the prints sold were fake a number were genuine. All have been offered a full refund and in addition any shipping. framing and other costs involved.

The Warhol's have also been mentioned and I think fall into two distinct categories:

Chanel Offest Lithograph's - these were published in 1997 by Chanel in conjunction with the Andy Warhol Foundation. The total edition is unknown we have sold multiples of these and have never had any issues whatsoever apart from some members here being unaware of the backstory to these prints. We will continue to sell these works.

Warhol "Unsigned/Unnumbered Proofs". The nature of running an auction house is that when you get a strong result for an item then you tend to get offered more of the same item. Which is exactly what happened here. A consignor consigned an image, it got a strong result and we were then offered others by various different consignors. These were in a number of our auctions and during this period we didn't receive any complaints or notifications that people thought they were fake. We had done our own research pre and post sale and these are openly sold by a number of auction houses and galleries. There are 2 galleries in particular - one in Israel and one in the States. They have been established for a long time and if these works are such obvious fakes then I wonder how are they allowed to still sell them. America in particular has an incredibly litigious culture and if these are indeed fake then it seems unbelievable that they continue to openly sell them. We have contacted all the consignors and the selling galleries for further information on the history/authenticity of these items but in the meantime we are going to do two things:

Firstly stop selling them until we can definitively establish the authenticity of these proofs.

Secondly offer anyone who has bought one a full refund if they wish. I do not believe we can do more.

I also notice that people mentioned Tate Ward selling Banksy prints without COA.We have done this on a number of occasions for clients who wanted to sell quickly and for whatever reason hadn't applied for the COA yet. We took these on a case by case basis and with the situation with the delays at PC well documented we didn't see this is a issue. Major auction houses do this all the time and again if the COA is not issued we would of course give a full refund.

Tate Ward selling GDP items appears to be another criticism. GDP/PC said they were not going to issue the PC certs for two years. What they didn't say is you can't/shouldn’t sell these works, they are two very different things. I am not sure how much money the people criticising us do or don't have but to some people who won items in the GDP lottery the potential sums involved are literally life changing. If they wish sell their items to improve their lives then I really don't think either they or Tate Ward should be apologists for this.

I would like to point out that we don't "make up" and use multiple forum names I’ve had the same account for 14 years. But would like thank members for the positive posts on these threads. Also a thank you to the people who have taken the time to text / email us with their support. Our last three auctions at TW were our best yet - all selling well in excess of £1m with a sell through rate of over 80% each time with the highest being 88%. We don't always get it right and clearly we have made errors here, however we have tried to rectify them to the best of our ability.

Over the past few years we have sold thousands and thousands of lots and the narrative that "Tate Ward selling Fakes" really is an unfair representation of what we have achieved as an auction house. I am not sure there is any auction house that hasn't had similar issues and I genuinely believe we have done our best to reach out to people and rectify these issues. Of course this won't be good enough for some people but what is important to us, is that it is good enough to the people that have been affected.

I do hope this explains our position clearly and again if anyone has been affected by these issues and hasn't been contacted then please do get in touch. This closes the matter for us we will not comment any further on either of these matters. If you wish to have a dialogue with us then please email myself Danny@tateward.com or Nick@tateward.com or arrange a call.

Finally we have two auctions coming up, one in Feb online with Artsy and then our next "Live" auction in March. Both are open for consignments so please get in touch with any work you are considering selling and we’ll come back to you with estimates.