Banksy forgers avoid jail over £200,000 eBay plot
Two art forgers were spared jail today despite admitting plotting to sell £200,000-worth of fake Banksy prints on eBay.
Grant Champkins-Howard and Lee Parker conned collectors into buying bogus screen prints they claimed were by the anonymous "guerilla artist".
More than 70 victims had been lined up as witnesses before the pair changed their pleas to guilty at Kingston crown court last month.
Further charges of copying and embellishing Seventies clothes by designer Vivienne Westwood and music producer Malcolm McLaren were dropped after legal argument. Judge Suzan Matthews described them as a pair of "old fashioned conmen" but imposed 12-month suspended sentences and 240 hours of unpaid community work.
The court heard that over five months last year the forgers marketed products they claimed had been made by Pictures on Walls, a company specialising in authentic Banksy prints.
They were arrested after a raid by the Met's Arts and Antiquities Fraud squad uncovered a haul of fake prints and the screens used to make them. Police had been tipped off by genuine dealers.
Champkins-Howard, 44, of South Croydon, and Parker, 45, of Eastbourne, admitted conspiring to defraud "persons who were seeking to purchase screen prints based on designs by the artist known as Banksy".
