Sounds like the problem is how these transactions escape any sales tax, thus these gimmicks and other forms of money laundering simply have zero cost or oversight.
Truly it's the purest form of Keynesian beauty context imaginable, and everyone who's participating hopes they won't be the greater fool.
Honestly, NFTs will make it into economic textbooks, assuming they haven't already. They've become these wonderfully pure little natural experiments in economic theory, and it's fascinating (and horrifying) watching them play out.
NFTs aren't even that. They're basically a mass-produced print with some unknown artist's signature. And unlike autographed mementos, NFTs require a ridiculous amount of electricity to generate each additional signature.
Were. As in, now they aren't. Because there's not any real value there.
Perhaps this kind of bubble / craze should be in economics textbooks - one that covers social and historic factors of failure. Probably Beanie Babies will be dealt with in the preamble on the section of Cryptocurrency, as a foreshadowing. And after the chapter on the Albanian ponzis and Civil War in 1997.
The whole purpose is to give the “journalist” just enough plausible deniability to write a clickbait headline, which benefits CNBC/BBC and the person selling within their family.
As far as I know, misleading “news” is not illegal.
"Fraud by false representation" happens when someone dishonestly makes a false representation with the intent to make a gain for themselves or another. Making up a news story to flip NFTs would almost certainly amount to a crime of fraud by false representation.
The more noteworthy you can make your NFT, the more you can convince people that they might be able to make some profit by flipping it, meaning the more you can sell it for.
The high prices are a known gimmick for grabbing headlines. “Useless NFT sells for $100,000” is (or was) a sure-fire way to get your NFT into the headlines. The trick was that you could actually bootstrap these high prices yourself without actually spending the money. If you have $100,000 in ETH sitting around, you didn’t have much to lose by using it to “buy” an NFT from yourself in a transaction with yourself. You keep the money, you keep the NFT, but now you’ve generated a public record of the NFT having sold for $100,000, and now you can claim to hold an extremely valuable NFT. After all, the record is on the public blockchain! No one can deny it “sold” for that high price.
Maybe this kid actually lucked into a trading fad where crypto-rich individuals had so much extra money that they didn’t care about tossing hundreds of thousands of dollars to a kid in exchange for a virtual blockchain receipt for the lulz. Or maybe they think they can use these headlines to further flip the NFTs at a profit to someone else.
But whenever you see a headline like this, it’s important to remember the possibility that maybe nothing actually changed hands at this price at all. If this kids’ dad (who works in finance) wanted to generate headlines hopes of flipping NFTs to someone else, what better way to do it than by getting headlines about your 12-year old making hundreds of thousands of dollars? All he needs to do is “buy” those NFTs with crypto funds, keeping the crypto funds in the family, and then start contacting news reporters about these miraculous, high value NFTs that they should totally write about in every outlet so that hopefully someone else will buy them for an even higher price. Come tax time, you can always argue that you never actually sold anything because you control both wallets, so there wasn’t any profit to be taxed.
You’re only out the transaction fees, so you can buy headlines like this for tens of dollars.