The Stormtrooper Scandal review: This NFT racket was a perfect storm of greed, stupidity and gullibility

I’m prepared to sell you one of my thoughts. You can’t see it, hear it, touch it, taste it or smell it, because, well… it’s a thought, and thoughts don’t have physical substance.

But think of it this way: it’s a unique thought, a true original. There’s not another thought like it in the world, and it can be yours for the modest price of a couple of thousand euro.

OK, let’s stop with this foolishness. A person would need to be really stupid to pay good money for something that doesn’t exist in the real world. But there are plenty of really stupid people in the whoppingly entertaining documentary The Stormtrooper Scandal (BBC2, Thursday, June 20).

The stupidest of the lot might well be the man at the centre of the story, curator and artist Ben Moore, who was a well-known figure on the London art scene. Moore is the worst kind of really stupid person: one who thinks he’s incredibly smart.

A few years ago, Moore acquired a Star Wars stormtrooper costume, sprayed it bright pink and paraded around London in it, having his picture taken in different poses — part-performance art, part-showing off. The pink stormtrooper became a kind of alter ego for him.

Then he had another bright idea. He got a load of the iconic stormtrooper helmets and persuaded a number of top British artists, including Damien Hirst, the Chapman Brothers, Antony Gormley, Chemical X and D*FACE, to customise them with their own unique designs.

The results were displayed in an exhibition called Art Wars. The artists were happy to do it for nothing since Art Wars was a charity project. Chemical X says: “I’d kind of met his type before, kind of posh chancer, but we all contribute to good causes.”

Moore took the exhibition on tour for a couple of years. When interest in it waned, he came up with yet another bright idea, one he hoped would make him very, very rich very, very quickly.

In 2021, Moore announced he’d be offering digital images of the helmets from the exhibition, each one unique, for sale as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with a price tag of £2,000. Interest was sky-high.

At the time, the craze for NFTs — 90pc of which are believed to be worthless today — was at its height, so there was no shortage of saps willing to shell out two grand for nothing more than pixels on a screen.

In order to make big money, however, Moore would need far more images than just the ones from the exhibition; he’d need a couple of thousand. This is where his shady associates, a pair of “crypto brothers” who went by the monikers “Crypto Cowboy” and “NFT Master”, came in.

Hiding away in Bosnia, they made up for the shortfall in images by churning out shoddy artworks, most of which were just duplicates with slightly different colour schemes.

‘There was no shortage of saps to shell out two grand for pixels on a screen’

The eager buyers knew nothing of this, of course, so when the online sale went live on November 6, 2021, the entire collection sold out in just five seconds. “I was going to own a piece of Star Wars history,” says one NFT investor in the documentary. Nobody would see the image they’d bought until three days after the sale.

Moore was suddenly rich beyond his wildest dreams. He posted a video of himself wearing his pink stormtrooper helmet, whooping and hollering about how he’d made £2m overnight.

He got even richer over the next 48 hours as many of those who’d bought NFTs sold them on to others at a higher price. For every resale, Moore and the crypto brothers got a percentage.

All bubbles burst eventually, but this bubble burst in record time. When the investors finally got to see the images they’d bought, most of them were outraged to discover they’d blown big money on digital junk.

This was nothing compared to the anger of the artists, who hadn’t been told their intellectual property was being sold online, resulting in the images being taken down, or of Lucasfilm, who didn’t take kindly to copyright infringement.

This was the perfect storm of greed, stupidity and gullibility. It’s possible to have a tiny sliver of sympathy for the fools who bought the NFTs, but not for Moore. He appears here, broke, mired in debt and self-pity, but showing no contrition.