Last month, a 25-year-old South East London man charged on credit two Banksy prints, Wrong War and a signed edition of No Ball Games, worth £12,990 (about $20,000 USD), from an Essex art dealer. Two weeks after the the work was shipped to the buyer, bank letters informed the dealer that payments made on the credit cards, one of which was registered to a holder in Arizona, were unauthorized and never went through. The dealer reported this to the police thinking he was shit out of luck. At that point the original buyer decided to go back to the same gallery for two more prints valued at £10,000 and got arrested.
Greenwich police searched an address linked to the suspect, who’s now out on bail, where they found the Wrong War print. He had already resold No Ball Games, to someone else who thought the transaction too sketchy and had turned it over directly to the gallery.
So, all’s well then? Moral of the story: Don’t try to scam the same dealer twice.
