Last year, the market for non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, skyrocketed, reaching an estimated $22 billion.

These digital assets are created as one-of-a-kind digital assets on a blockchain and are available for trading in bitcoin. According to artists, the largest NFT platform, OpenSea, is doing much too little to prevent the trafficking of fake art. It places a large portion of the duty of monitoring art fraud on the artists themselves. DeviantArt, a decades-old online community for digital artists that holds half a billion pieces of digital art, is now screening 4 million newly minted NFTs each week for fraud.

In a statement, OpeanSea disclosed that it is against their policy to sell NFTs using plagiarized content, detailing that it was developing new picture recognition and other techniques to swiftly identify stolen material and protect artists, aiming to debut some of these in the first half of this year.

Tina Rivers Ryan, a curator and digital art expert at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, says blockchain makes it easier to commit forgeries because all it takes is a right-click. "How do you sue the anonymous holder of a crypto wallet? In which jurisdiction?" she asks.

One huge mess

Aja Trier, a Texas-based artist claims to have uncovered 87,000 NFTs based on photos of her work for sale on an online auction platform, many of which are valued at $9.88.

500 entries of her stolen work were posted in a single night, implying that the crime was automated and carried out by bots.

Trier and several other artists indicated that tweeting aggressively about the matter or contacting media outlets was the most successful approach to convince the corporation to remove their stolen work.

At least 37 NFTs based on Trier's stolen work were purchased before OpenSea removed the fake ads, according to Trier, and she has yet to receive any of the money, despite the fact that OpenSea takes a 2.5% fee on each sale.

“It seems to me that they’re making some money on illicit behavior,” Trier said. “They have a $13bn valuation and they’re trying to go public. How much of their valuation is from stolen art?”

According to Ashli Weiss, a Silicon Valley intellectual property lawyer who works with blockchain businesses, there is now little motivation for OpenSea and other marketplaces to remedy the problem because of their earnings.

OpenSea refuted her claim and a spokesperson said the issues must be addressed head-on. More than half of the firm's existing employees work full-time or extensively on plagiarism and content moderation concerns, and the company is creating "smart moderation" techniques to speed up the company's reaction to allegations of plagiarism.

While some artists would want to see a crackdown on bots, OpenSea stated that generating hundreds or thousands of NFTs at once is common for the space, citing 10,000 "Bored Apes" and over 8,000 "Pudgy Penguins", two of the most renowned and financially successful NFT collections.

Van Baarle, a Dutch digital artist, stated that OpenSea's mechanism for reporting art theft had improved slightly over the past year, replacing an old "report" button with a reporting form that easily and clearly logged the fraud. However, she says the corporation could still do more to check NFT validity before the token is offered for sale.

Van Baarle adds that though the concept is supposed to be about authenticity, “it looks like the opposite,” adding, “from where I’m standing, it looks like one huge mess of theft and fraud and inauthenticity."