9x12 Pastel on Paper

Winter Shadows – 9×12 Pastel on paper

What a bummer of a deal.  You work hard, paint daily, list your paintings and work on sites you trust, Facebook and instagram faithfully and start to see some progress in your sales.  You’re doing it!  You’re becoming a working artist!  Life is exciting, colors are fresh and invigorating, and all your dreams are coming true.  And then….enter the bad guy.  The art scammer.  If you’ve ever been victim of a scam you know how disappointing, frustrating, upset, and angry you feel.  It’s such a low form of manipulation.  Unfortunately, it’s a sad and real truth that if you have anything on the internet that is attached to your name and someone sees a loophole to cheat you and steal from you, they will.

I’ve personally been contacted in *just the past week” from two different scammers that have lied, manipulated, and falsified their information in order to scam me out of art and money.  It’s a terrible feeling to be “had.”  Luckily for me, something just didn’t sit right (more on this later) and I canceled the sales.  I went from cloud 9 to cloud 0 and it stinks and I don’t ever want to be weaseled into spending too much time and energy worrying about these folks.

I’ve detailed a list of 5 important things to watch for when being contacted by a potential buyer.  Usually, these scammers find your information via your website, an art sales site, via Facebook (if your painting posts are listed as “public”), via Instagram, or Twitter.  They are searching for those desperate, unwary, and hungry artists that will overlook inconvenient sales circumstances and unusual situations for the blessing and excitement of a big sale.  Be cautious!  The scammers goal is for the artist to ship the art without paying – usually with stolen credit cards that will be revoked or phony checks in the mail.

1. Too Good to be True?

The first and probably most depressing of the tips is that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  Rarely does an artist find a buyer that is willing to shell over 1000’s of dollars for work via one email.  Usually a transaction of that nature comes via a gallery with personal contact from the collector or via many emails and calls that are careful and inquiring. The scam emails I’ve received generally come to my inbox during the night.  I received inquiries about many pieces all with a request to “please get back to me with final price.”  This was a bit odd as the prices are listed on the site where they found me.  It made me wonder if this “buyer” was wanting a discount if he/she bought several?  Not knowing, I emailed the buyer directly and asked which pieces they were interested in.  They answered with a simple sentences, inconsistent punctuation,  and all lower caps that listed three titles of three different paintings than those they first referenced.  They said they wanted to buy all three immediately.  Today.

Wow!  But also…..Hmmm…

 



2. Check the Wording of the Email 

The simple sentences, punctuation errors, all lower caps?

Scammers usually originate in foreign countries. I could immediately tell that English was usually not the first language of the person who sent the messages.  They were incredibly polite and nothing seems *too* odd.  However, the messengers were vague about the pieces they wanted, didn’t have incredible detail about what they are wanting to purchase (until I asked), and wanted me to invoice them and email them back immediately.  All of this was in careful but slightly “off” English.  I noticed that over the course of the day, the email languages seemed to vary, almost as if several different “authors” were writing them.

Again…Hmmmm…

3.  Asking for Personal Information

In my case, the scammer asked for my address so he could “arrange for his courier to pick up the pieces.”  I have dealt with some courier services before but I immediately felt weird giving some random stranger my personal address.  A courier?  Who employs a personal courier?  Maybe some but not in my neck o’ the woods.  I usually ship my paintings via UPS, FedEx or to a shipping agent who handles unpacking and delivery. The cost is usually negotiated upfront and in clear writing.

 




4.  Check the IP Address of the Sender

This is pretty straightforward.  If your contact has told you where they live, check it out!  Use google to your advantage. Don’t let them be the only ones to use the internet to check people out.  Search the name or trace the email.  You can use this site to trace an IP Address: What is My IP Address? Are they an actual person?  Do they have a Facebook?  Be your own private investigator.  Ask to contact them via another method.  Ask for a phone number so you can hear their voice.  Anything to “personalize” the transaction.  If you don’t want to seem suspicious, ask in the guise of wanting to provide better customer service.  It’s your art and your money.  Don’t lose both.

In my case, my scammer was using a private IP Address.  Read more about this here.  Basically, this is a non-routable (non-searchable) IP Address.  This was an immediate red flag and one that caused all halts of further communication with the scammer.

5. Offering to OverPay

Here is the final word-for-word email from one of the scammers that contacted me.  At this point, it was almost funny (albeit angering and sad) that this person thought I would ever agree to such terms.

I just got a mail from the shipping company that i will need to pay
for the freighting fees before they can schedule pre-shipping/ pickup
date,the charged fee for the pick up and delivery is $400,but the
problem is they only accept Money Gram transfer as form of payment and
i don’t have one around me here,will it be OK with you if I include
the courier fee  together with the amount I am sending to you making
the total amount of $2,075 and as soon as the money goes through you
can help me make the freighting fees of $400 through  Money Gram
transfer? You are not obliged to help me, but i will indeed appreciate
your help as I am a little incapacitated here.I would wait to hear
from you,thanks and God bless.

So basically, they wanted to overpay me and then have me “refund” them their shipping money. And…what in the heck is Money Gram?

Dude. No.

Note this didn’t get picked up by my very good spam filter.  Because they had emailed me through an art sales site and I emailed them back from my personal account they circumvented the system. My bad. This was the longest email I received from them and was so obviously a scam I halted all further emails, changed my passwords to my websites and wrote this article.

So there scammers.

Hopefully if you’re an artist, writer, illustrator, or designer you’ll never have one of these encounters and you’ll make heaps of money and it will all be legit.  If you do get contacted however…be cautious, TRUST YOUR GUT, delay the sale, investigate on your own, have the payment made via escrow agent…(final transactions, shipping etc. are not completed until all of the funds have been verified and cleared), deal locally.  Protect yourself!

xxoo

Bethany

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