How Meme Detectives Stop NFT Fraud

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.