Justin Bieber and Eminem to Snoop Dogg, mixed fortunes of celebrities who leapt on NFT craze

Paris: Film, music and sports stars have all flocked to the NFT market to buy

pictures of apes, endorse corporate partners or even launch their own art collections.

Even as the crypto sector suffers a rout with sales and values plunging and scams

proliferating, celebrities continue to sign up to the craze for so-called Non-Fungible Tokens.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club is the ground zero of NFT "collectables".

It features cartoon images replicated thousands of times with algorithm-generated variations.

The initial collection of 10,000 computer generated images has been followed by

several other generations and many millions of fakes.

To fans, they are a status symbol, a key to an exclusive club where ordinary folk can mix with the famous and wealthy.