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The Hook You get a message or email claiming you’ve violated copyright terms, or that your account is about to be suspended. It’s built to feel urgent and official, using logos and formatting copied from the real platform. The Build-Up The message includes a link and a countdown,…
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The Hook A message comes in offering to pay you, often a few hundred dollars, to place a single ad on your page or profile. It might be a paid placement of their product or service, with you demonstrating or holding the product. The number they are offering is usually higher than a real ad…
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The Hook Someone messages you claiming to be a professor or a grad student. They say they came across your art and want to feature it in a class presentation or their thesis. No money is offered here. The flattery is the whole pitch, and for a lot of artists that’s more than enough to get a…
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A lot of the scams targeting artists are about tricking you into accepting payment in a way that gives the scammer an easy way to take the money back later, or that never actually gets you paid at all. Most of this comes down to knowing which payment methods actually protect you and which ones just…
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If you offer commissions online, you’ve probably had someone message you out of nowhere about a piece they “bought” from you. Sometimes it’s real, but sometimes it’s a scam built entirely around getting you to open a file you shouldn’t. Here’s how it…
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If you sell your art online, you’ve probably gotten a message that felt a little too good to be true. Lately, a specific version of that message has been showing up more often, and it’s worth breaking down because it’s designed to look legitimate. The setup usually involves…
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So if you sell your art online, at some point you’re going to get a message that seems too good to pass up. Someone says they want to buy basically your whole stock. Not one painting, all of them. And honestly, when you’ve spent months trying to sell individual pieces one at a time,…
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If you’re an artist with any kind of online presence, you’ve probably gotten a message like this. Someone reaches out, tells you they love your work, and asks if you’d like to be featured in an upcoming art book. It feels great. It feels like the moment you’ve been waiting…
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If you post art online long enough, you’ll eventually get a message from an account with a big following, telling you your work is amazing and offering to feature you to their audience. All you have to do is pay a small fee. It sounds like a good deal. It’s not. It’s a pretty…
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If you sell art commissions online, you’ve probably heard some version of this story, or lived it yourself. It’s called the overpayment scam, and it’s a variation on the old fake check scam that’s been around for decades. The internet just gave it a new coat of paint. It…
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Intro