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    How Meme Detectives Stop NFT Fraud

    Many classic memes were recently auctioned off for big bucks by their owners as NFTs. But how do you determine meme ownership? Don Caldwell and his team from Know Your Meme from been using their extensive knowledge of meme history to thwart NFT fraud. This is how they do it.

    Released on 09/24/2021

    Transcript

    Many classic memes were recently auctioned off

    for big bucks by their owners, as NFTs.

    The question of meme ownership

    is a difficult one.

    Meet Don Caldwell from Know Your Meme,

    a website dedicated

    to researching online viral content.

    It's sort of like meme detective work.

    Recently, Don and his team

    have been putting their encyclopedic knowledge

    of memes to good use, forwarding NFT fraud.

    So here's the original and the fake,

    I'll zoom in real tight here.

    So what kind of hard-boiled vigilante tactics

    do these meme detectives use?

    No, we actually just use computers.

    Saved onto a blockchain,

    NFTs or non fungible tokens

    are minted by artists

    and then bought and sold online

    in curated markets like OpenSea, Foundation

    and even at Sotheby's,

    NFTs are kind of like

    limited edition autographed virtual trading cards

    that allow for the tracking and monetizing

    of digital art, such as gifs, photos, videos,

    music, and yes, even memes.

    The first time I heard about meme NFTs

    was when Nyan Cat creator, Chris Torres,

    sold Nyan Cat as an NFT for approximately

    600,000 US dollars at the time.

    And when we saw that

    we were just absolutely shocked.

    It was such a milestone in internet history.

    This jaw-dropping sale triggered

    a meme gold rush.

    All of these old meme stars and celebrities

    from years ago started coming out of the woodwork

    and started to mint an auction themselves

    or their work as NFTs.

    But since an NFT is like a digital certificate

    of authenticity, it's provenance is key.

    A meme NFT is only valuable

    if the creator or the person in the meme

    minted it.

    This is where Know Your Meme comes in.

    Not only do they manage an encyclopedia

    of close to 5,000 confirmed memes.

    Here we go again.

    They're the ones who can authenticate

    the true owner when it's time for it

    to be minted as an NFT.

    Pinpointing the exact origins

    of where these phenomenon come from

    can be quite challenging.

    A difference between traditional detective work,

    and what we do

    is that we're dealing with online data

    that has a lot of metadata associated with it,

    and we're able to trace things back

    and see how much engagement they've had,

    who their original creator is,

    who the original poster is a lot of the time,

    depending on the platform.

    Reddit, with its archive posts

    is easy to search.

    Same with Twitter, the ephemeral 4chan,

    not so much.

    Facebook is notoriously insular

    and doesn't play nice with Google,

    so the team might use CrowdTangle, TinEye

    or their own proprietary dashboard

    to SLU on social.

    Tracking down something on YouTube

    can be more challenging.

    Reverse image search doesn't work with videos,

    so you have to sift through lots of episodes

    and YouTube uploads, define the exact moment

    that is taken for a meme.

    Sometimes we'll consult fan communities

    that are very familiar with the source material

    and ask for their assistance

    to discover where these memes come from sometimes.

    Maintaining close relationships

    with meme creators and communities

    pays off in tips and leads.

    That's how the team was alerted

    that something was very wrong

    with the auction of a meme masterpiece.

    Rage comics are another meme

    that comes from this old era of internet history.

    They were very popular comic format.

    We discovered that there was an NFT of Me Gusta

    being auctioned off

    on the NFT marketplace foundation.

    So there were a number of alarm bells

    that went off when we began looking into this

    that made this clearly

    some sort of shady practice.

    The original Me Gusta image

    was an illustration done by May.

    So here's the original and the fake.

    I'll zoom in real tight here.

    So here you have all these squiggles

    and the lines get really thin

    and there's like shading.

    And then over here,

    everything's pretty much uniform

    in terms of darkness, right?

    So you can tell that it's been vectorized.

    A lot of rage comics are made in MS Paint.

    People will use a mouse cursor

    to make these faces.

    And they're very crude,

    usually just black and white.

    It loses this kind of level of detail in order

    to get this super high res version of it,

    that's, you know, line art made of Bezier curve.

    So it's kind of got all the telltale signs

    of a vector art recreation of a raster image.

    So Adobe illustrator has a tool

    known as live tracing

    that may have been used here.

    It takes a raster image and it traces over it

    and turns it into a vector image.

    Simple lines and curves

    that can then be scaled infinitely

    to any resolution,

    but they also take away details

    and they take away shading,

    but anyone who's used it before

    can tell when something's been vectorized,

    versus something that's just been illustrated.

    Apart from this forensic evidence,

    another clue was that the poser

    used May's dead name.

    That's when the Know Your Meme team

    reached out to her directly.

    May responded that she was very surprised

    to find out that an NFT was being auctioned off

    as she had not been the one to auction it off.

    Platforms, such as Foundation,

    require that artists being invited

    before being allowed to mint their NFTs.

    So how did this faker slip through?

    They had dug into her background,

    figured out that she had known certain people

    and approach them acting as May

    in order to get their NFT minted

    and auctioned off.

    So after we realized

    that this was likely an imposter,

    we reached out to the marketplace

    that the NFT was being auctioned on

    and asked them about their vetting process

    and how they had determined that this

    was owned by the original creator.

    And later that day, the auction was removed.

    May Oswald had this piece of advice.

    Be careful with them meme kids,

    you know, only get your memes

    from trusted sources

    The work of a meme detective is never done

    and soon the team would receive

    what would become their highest profile case yet.

    So one day we were reached out to,

    by this decentralized auction house

    known as the Zora.

    They were working with the owner of Doge,

    Atsuko Satō, who lives in Japan.

    We also felt there was this importance

    with certifying the authenticity of NFTs

    after seeing this Me Gusta fiasco.

    So we offered to certify this Doge auction

    as authentic after verifying it with Atsuko.

    We knew her

    and we had even interviewed her ourself prior.

    So there were eight photographs of Doge

    that were auctioned off on Zora.

    One being the most iconic Doge image,

    which sold for approximately 4 million US dollars

    at the time.

    And the case of Doge and Atsuko Satō,

    not only was she able to be rewarded

    for her contribution to culture,

    but she also donated

    a significant portion of the auction to charity.

    All in a day's work for Know Your Meme.

    So is the Wikipedia viral content

    becoming full-time NFT fraud investigators now?

    It's hard to tell exactly

    what point in the phase we are,

    if this is just a bubble that's bound to pop.

    I would wager that it will be around

    for some years to come,

    as this has provided artists

    with a way to be rewarded

    for their contributions to culture

    in ways they didn't have before.

    I envision in the future that historians

    and anthropologists will be using

    Know Your Meme to figure out what was happening

    during this time.

    What was their sense of humor?

    What did they care about?

    In a sense memes are this

    kind of lens into the soul of humanity.

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