Ways of due diligence before collecting art.

June 21st, 2022

NOTES!

1st Note: This mirror is intended to be a quick guide for what collectors can do to quick re-check artists’ legitimacy, if you are here only for that you can skip and jump right to “DUE DILIGENCE” section.

2nd note for donation/collecting the mirror: Due to Mirror’s recent changes, to avoid the inconvenient collecting through Optimism net, I decided to mint my own NFT Editions on ETH mainnet (with Mirror link attached on the NFT’s description).

There are 3 type of NFTs with 1/1 will go through auction on Foundation. You may support me through these links below and feel free to collect which one you like the most!

1/1 LEGENDARY (Sold for 1 ETH to rwx.eth)

COLLECT RARE (Sold out)

COLLECT COMMON (0.01 ETH each; 100 Editions for public)

INTRODUCTION

Hello frens!

A small introduction, I’m an artist that jumped into the NFT space in April 2021. People know me as yunyuliart or you may simply call me Yun.

And I’m not alone! Meet Caleb, a very kind and humble fren I met online that does fancy dev-stuff that I don’t understand about and Caleb comes with a big brain play to keep the space safer! We will talk more about it later.

While being an artist, after a few months I’ve also slowly started collecting 1/1 NFTs on Foundation, then slowly I keep catching one by one, some fake artists, impersonators and art thefts that attempted or even sold stolen art that was of course, not theirs. It was tiring as some of you may know I’ve been tweeting to expose those thieves’ wallet addresses to alert my friends & followers just simply so they won’t spend their hard-worked eth on them and keep the 1/1 community safe.

Mission Objective

I started my journey at Foundation, I’ve been observing the platform as a user, And this is the place I started collecting 1/1. I’m familiar with it so I want to tell a little bit of the reason why I made this Mirror and why this section is about Foundation.

For the record in case you are new, Foundation was previously an exclusive curated-platform where creator needs an invitation to be able to mint and sell NFTs. Then after the invited artists got sale/bid they will get a new invitation to onboard other artists. Long story short Foundation announced on May 18, 2022, that Foundation is open to everyone without an invite.

Previously, some bad actors saw the opportunity to exploit Foundation’s old curation system, an “invite” supposedly a community-curation system except they invite themselves on their alt wallets to sell a stolen art behind a new anonymous name. It was fairly easy for me to track where certain artists coming from, who invited or introduced them to Foundation, etc, all thanks to the invitation system but it’s a whole different story after Foundation’s choice of opening up the platform without any curation at all. Thus we will hardly know where certain artists are coming from, and who do we ask for their legitimacy for being the original artists or not.

Bad actors previously need the extra steps to get invited, then they need sales to generate invitations so then they can keep inviting their own alt wallet to continue their theft journey and keep repeating those efforts if one wallet got caught.

An open platform but still holding the charisma of an exclusive 1/1 platform making it a better choice for art thefts to sell stolen art with limitless possibilities and can easily hop on another wallet if one wallet got caught by me or someone else.

Although I understand Foundation’s vision that they are aiming for decentralization and pushing forward the web3 boundaries. But it is now us genuine artists & collectors are going to need the extra steps to sell or collect art. Honestly I don’t want collectors to need the very extra step of checking whether each artist is legit or not, and I don’t want new/veteran collectors to get scared away due to this.

So here we are, in this mirror I will need help from all of you guys my friends to at least know what to do, to be cautious of suspicious accounts, to spread this information so all of us are safe whether you are veteran collector, new collector, or upcoming collector :)

Lastly if people feel convenient and safe on the platform, they will keep using it and even recommending it to their friends. By prioritizing community first we will see a bright future to get mass adoption faster.

DUE DILIGENCE

What we are focusing on in this mirror is strictly only art theft, in which we can objectively say the work belongs to someone else and the minter/uploader is not the original artist.

We are not going to dig into traced art, heavy referenced art, or Copyrighted fanart. Those are grey areas that I maybe will make a separate mirror if I have the chance in the future.

DISCLAIMER: This is all sorted from the first thing I do to the last thing I do but all according to my convenience and my style to do Due Diligence AND might not be the perfect way for someone else.

So, first step is..

1. Reverse Image Search

This will be the first thing that comes to mind for most people on this stuff. Simply copy-paste or drag & drop the jpeg to a certain website, and it will try to search for the most similar picture according to each website.

Here are some websites you can use from best to bad according to my experience:

SauceNao works for anime jpeg, most of the time catches from Pixiv and Twitter
iqdb.org works for anime jpeg, catches from multiple website sources
Yandex works for general, sometimes able to catch edited or flipped images
ascii2d works for anime jpeg
TinEye general use
Google general use

Take a note that a repost will sometimes show up too so you need to check again if the source you got is legit, a quick judge would be from the follower count is low or a seemingly like a shitposting account.

Additional fancy one is trace.moe that you can use to search specific anime from a cut anime scene.

Oh? the website above doesn’t provide any correct source and you still suspicious on the artist?
let’s continue below..

2. Work Portfolio & Art Activity

Another most basic one is to check their background or history on the artist’s whole work portfolio. But I know there are people that rarely or even never posted their artwork/sketches while being legit artist. So this one is not really the answer but more of to add your conviction when an artist is established and already has a lot of works done in their portfolio. Otherwise put more investigation on the next step.

While for art activities, some artists love to post art-related stuff on their social media to keep their audience hyped.

It could be:

sketches/WIP
drawing on livestream (example on discord, twitch)
or a speedpaint

And if you are an emerging artist reading this, I really recommend you to start doing those to gain collectors’ trust ;)

Note specifically for sketches/WIP, be wary that sketches is the easiest one to fake. Could be straight stolen sketch from the original artist again, or a quick traced line art from the original work, or a filter from photoshop/other similar apps. To deal with this unfortunately you need to exercise your eyes to notice the differences.

Yes it sounds tiring as these bad guys will always try to pretend and faking it. This is why curated platform is good smh..

Here are some of the sketches example from my own work. These are how my progress looks like. Different artist will also use different technique to sketch.

The best option for artists to convince collectors is showing the progress of the work like a video/livestream or a speedpaint if the artist uses procreate. The difference between a video/speedpaint with sketches is that on sketches you will only see a single picture of rough lines look compared to the final result, in the other hand a video/speedpaint will give you many pictures of how the shape progressed, modified, or sometimes changed completely different on some part before the final result.

For example, as I’m a photoshop user, here’s my progress from start to final on my recent work.

3. On-chain/Web3 Tracking

In this method we will not be relying on the art but instead we check more of the artist’s identity and history across web3 platforms.

I used this method a lot to gather evidences when I’m exposing art theft in my tweet above if the account is very suspicious.

The steps I usually do are probably looking like this:

Check the wallet activity on opensea (copy paste the wallet address into opensea.io/paste-here). This works for other platforms as well like Foundation (foundation.app/paste-here), SuperRare (superrare.com/paste-here), etc.
Some thief tends to use the same wallet to sell/scam other stuff on opensea that is completely unrelated to supposedly their art style (a bit subjective but consider this into your suspicion).
Check whether their opensea is not flagged/reported.

Example of removed account due to report

Or the wallet is flagged or compromised and in the hand of a hacker.

Check the wallet on etherscan, especially the first funding tx. (etherscan.io/address/paste-here)

Check on etherscan whether the wallet is involved with another theft/scammers’ wallet (more details in the next section).
Check the funder’s wallet on etherscan, foundation, opensea and repeat it from the step above.

Example of reported wallet on Foundation

If you catch any red flags from above, I’d suggest to avoid them first and give them time to clarify.

4. Etherscan Tagging (Idea from Caleb)

This is where Caleb’s idea comes in handy for me (eventually for all of us too in the future) to quick check wallets when I discover another suspicious wallet.

So here’s how it works:

I do research on many artists
I will provide sources with evidence if I expose any art theft (will be updated on my art theft list tweet)
Tag/mention Etherscan or ping Caleb and they will help put a Tag for the thefts’ wallet based on my source to be displayed as “Artist_Impersonator” on etherscan (naming might be subject to change).

Example of tagged thief's wallet looks like on etherscan

Example of tagged thief's wallets history on etherscan

How does this help me and the community ?

I’m surfing etherscan a lot when doing these due diligence.
Of course I’m checking the wallet history whether the wallet was funded by another scammer/thief wallet or not.
Rather than remembering each thief’s wallet addresses with random numbers (0x…) and checking every wallets, seeing the tag “Artist Impersonator” straight will save my time by A LOT.
My time saved a lot and I will do my mission faster.
Mission done faster means Caleb can put the Tag also faster.
The thief’s wallet tagged faster means the public will see the tag before they buy a stolen art.

If the stage above is successful, I hope people start to standardize checking certain person's wallets to see whether they got Tagged or not BUT also remember that if a thief didn’t get tagged that doesn’t mean they are safe, could be me being not active at the time or didn’t pass by that theft on my end. I will do my best and strive for it, that is why my mission is to make the space safer and I really believe convenience is the first step to achieve it, hence what Caleb’s idea does have really aligned with me.

Caleb also graciously helped proof-read this writing and generously gave me the permission to release this Mirror without any splitting. As a thank you, I will gift a 1/1 later and I hope we can build more amazing stuff for the community in the next chapter.

Now this place is out of the map, the underground will no longer about due diligence. You may leave if you want agents, cheers.

YOUR TURN

Congrats you have made it here!

You have read and learned all the steps above all the way down, its time for you to spread the words and gatekeep all the bad actors.

Alert Your Friends

This time its about how you deal wisely with thieves you catch later on, *besides just ignoring them*.

Before you tell your friend, before you make a tweet, before you ping your community in discord, I have tips on how to maximize convenience (again) when making a public alert.

When announcing a thief web3 account with link, always put their wallet address on the link instead of username.

Lets put myself as an example.
Dont: foundation.app/@yun
Do: foundation.app/0x010d7eAfceC7589832aca1170aEb23d21951D396

Dont: opensea.io/yunyuliart
Do: opensea.io/0x010d7eAfceC7589832aca1170aEb23d21951D396
Username can be easily changed at any time, while their wallet address won't change.
With that, your source will be reliable. Links will always be correctly linked to the thief’s account even if they change username.

CLOSING

I think that’s all at least for now, these are all been in my mind for months. I’m happy to finally be able to voice out my concern, and I know this is not the end, the space will have a competition to cover each lacks, build on top of each other, aggregate each other or the community itself will keep improving to make the ideal place that is decentralized while still secure from art thefts.

This mirror is just the beginning, these are not perfect yet to be called a guide but it’s better to start one and hear feedback rather than waiting for each other and have no improvement towards the community.

Lastly, I apologize for my bad english and my messy writing. I still often use google translate, doubled down with writing as my least expertise in my art journey. I most of the time bad at communicating stuff and that’s part of the reason I make art through illustration.

However, I appreciated all the supports if you liked my writing or my art! Sharing it is highly appreciated as well!

Again, Thank you so much for being here with me!