In most cases, news "NFT wAs JusT sOld For A WhOpiNg ..." is just a wash trade

A wash trade is a form of market manipulation in which an investor simultaneously sells and buys the same financial instruments to create misleading, artificial activity in the marketplace. First, an investor will place a sell order, then place a buy order to buy from themself, or vice versa.

It's a common practice even in well regulated spheres, let alone such markets as artwork and NFTs.

Opensea and similar NFT platforms took wash trading to another level. With the pseudonymity of blockchain wallets, it's extremely easy to buy/sell NFT's from/to yourself for one of the following reasons:

1) the collection owners may want to maintain or increase the floor price

2) item or collection owners may want to make news => people start talking about your collection/item => hype

Let's take a look at the second scenario more closely:

A particular individual owns, say a Dumpster Fire Reddit NFT. The same particular individual also happens to own 11 ETH. Move that 11 ETH to a brand new Wallet 2 (possibly through a non-KYC CEX or a bridge to hide tracks). Wallet 1 place a sell order for 10 ETH on said Dumpster Fire. Wallet 2 buys said Dumpster Fire for 10 ETH.

This particular individual still owns both the NFT and the ETH minus the fees that go to Opensea and collection owner fees (under 10% I assume, depends on the collection).

r/cc's front page is taken over by posts like "Dumpster Fire just sold for 10 ETH", "Some just made billion x profit on a Reddit Nft", "Free Reddit NFT's are the current top performer on Opensea" then "No, your Dumpster Fire isn't worth 10 ETH" and "What's with all the Reddit NFT's posts" and so on.... you know the drill.

News publishers pick up on it and this spins out of control.

So, most news about NFT's are faker than Tether's transparency page.

PS: By the way, if this particular individual had 10 ETH, he would totally pull it off, grab popcorn and read the shitstorm that would ensue.