The fascination with socialite scammers takes streaming platforms by storm, and viewers can’t get enough of them. This year alone, Netflix has already released several con artist docu-series, including “Inventing Anna,” “The Tinder Swindler,” and “Bad Vegan.” Each show follows the almost unbelievable lengths people go to construct elaborate fraudulent reputations and schemes.
Anna Sorokin’s story stood out from a spectacular list. Using the fake identity of a German heiress, Sorokin would mingle with New York’s wealthiest socialites and high-end art enthusiasts to con money out of them. Her victims included investors and banks who thought they were funding her idea for a private art club and foundation.
While Sorokin’s story caught a wave of media frenzy, the issue of impostors, counterfeits, and money laundering schemes within the art industry is nothing new. The growth of the digital arts and NFTs space has only made artists, creators, and collectors more vulnerable to new online art fraud and scams.
The digital art industry needs to explore an entirely new infrastructure and system to avoid losing to counterfeits and scam artists. There are multiple options available, but this article will explore REV3AL.
REV3AL is building a comprehensive system to streamline the verification process for digital assets and NFTs using multiple layers of on-chain and off-chain authentication solutions. It will provide NFT artists, marketplaces, and collectors a straightforward solution to immediately spot impostors, scammers, or forgers, like Anna Sorokin.
Tips to stay safe in the digital art world
Self-authenticate your work
Certifying assets is a common practice in many industries. For instance, in the fine diamond industry, regulated labs, such as the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), issue certificates to verify the authenticity and grade of precious stones.
REV3AL’s certification platform is an analog for the digital arts industry. It will allow artists and creators to upload their finished art and encode it with multi-factor authentication layers before placing it on the marketplace. These measures will impede impostors like Sorokin since anyone can easily authenticate the asset in the future.
Always verify assets and artwork
Sorokin often posed as a collector of expensive art, flaunting her wealth and assets. Anyone would have seen through the scam if she had to verify and prove the authenticity of her physical and digital assets.
REV3AL empowers collectors to easily upload and verify artwork within seconds using multi-factor layers of encrypted authentication added by the original artist. This way, art dealers and buyers can easily identify counterfeits and avoid impostors.
Regulate and authenticate
The main issue with the high-end art market is that it is one of the largest and most unregulated industries globally. Anyone can enter the art market without any identity verification, and it’s even easier in the online NFT marketplace, where users can be anonymous.
The industry needs regulation standards to prove that art buyers or dealers have a positive record of transactions without links to illegal activity. An example is REV3AL’s metaverse marketplace. Artists can verify the authenticity of their artwork using the REV3AL platform so that the market is free of impostors and counterfeits.
Conclusion
The art scene is riddled with impostors like Anna Sorokin, posing as authentic art owners and dealers to scam the unassuming enthusiast. User and market growth will remain underwhelming as long as counterfeits, forgeries, and fake dealers roam free in the digital and physical art world.
Apparently, there is no single solution to solve the issue of counterfeits and scammers in the art industry. REV3AL aims to transform the industry and provide a new standard and system centered around accountability and authentication.
