Scams and Discouragement

[lpetiti]

On the topic of scams, I (thankfully) caught a scammer before any time, effort, or money was spent. This person/bot looked at one of my pieces and asked me to message "her" if I did commissions. So I did, keeping in mind to only ask for a digital form of payment and for her to discuss her ideas with me.

My husband has a great gift for cyber-spying/security and when I sent him the profile he immediately came back with the ACTUAL profile and we discovered this was a fake account. At first I thought I'd have some fun and completely spell out the most unrealistic expectations, then got tired of it, reported "her" and blocked her.

I definitely know this is not uncommon among artists, and thankfully my husband has made me more cautious online (he learned coding back in the early 00's, which he refers to as the "wild west" days of the internet). I was going through vetting the "client" and already was suspicious. Even though nothing bad happened, this is the second or third time in a few months a scammer has attempted something on me.

Anyone else get discouraged by things like this? Honestly this combined with lackluster sales/artwork in general is discouraging me. Not great when this year has been extremely hard for me artistically anyway.

[Rafael Morales III]

@lpetiti I've had these types of email's in the past. Twice to be exact. However, my spidey sense tingled each time. What are these scammers trying to get from us, art, money? It's annoying.

[kirsten-mcg]

@lpetiti Sorry to hear that you're feeling discouraged artistically. I've dealt with several scammers this year too. Fortunately, the only thing I've lost to them is time. That's funny that your husband refers to the early '00s as the Wild West of the internet. I still feel like we're living in it as scams and security continue to become more and more of an issue! The last scammer I dealt with I actually purposefully wasted "her" time and posted our entire conversation to my stories on instagram. I then created a highlight on my profile titled "How to Scam a Scammer" and included the entire conversation in it. I haven't been contacted by a scammer since. Maybe it's coincidence, or maybe it really is scarring some of them off my account.

[Gabby Correia]

I'm so sorry to hear this. Scammers are everywhere and they are getting more and more sneaky. I have gotten an email before asking for a commission for their wife and they will pay me x amount of dollars. If it's too good to be true... it unfortunately, usually is.

[lpetiti]

The weird thing was it’s not like the scammer responded right away either. I would have thought if they were truly trying they would have immediately responded before I started getting suspicious. I was curious so I looked at their profile this morning and either I scared them or the legit account reported them because they’re gone at least

[NessIllustration]

I used to get those a lot and funnily enough, just realized that it's been a long while since I received one. At least a year and a half! I wonder what happened so they decided to leave me alone...

[lpetiti]

@NessIllustration yeah it’s weird when things just stopped. I’ve stopped getting spam emails asking me to “accept millions” at my work email after I trolled some idiot for a week

[LauraA]

@lpetiti Huh, interesting, because I had one of these recently too. But since I responded that I wasn't doing commissions, it didn't go any further. Now I'm curious. How did your husband find the real account?

But yeah, sometimes it seems we hardly have time to do our work, and now we have to deal with this...

[lpetiti]

@LauraA He showed me some back channels and some websites he can use to reverse image search.