The "Can We Repost Your Video?" Scam

Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels

If you post your art, animations, or short clips on TikTok or Instagram Reels, you’ve probably gotten a message like this: some account with a vague name, a decent follower count, and a profile picture of a logo instead of a person, asking if they can repost your video to their page. Sounds harmless, even flattering. It’s not always that simple.

The Hook

The message usually starts with a compliment. “Love this piece, huge fan of your style, we’d love to feature you.” Sometimes there’s a follow-up mentioning exposure to their audience, which might be in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Occasionally they’ll offer a small payment, often somewhere around twenty dollars, framed as a token thank-you rather than real compensation. The pitch is built to feel low-stakes. You’re not being asked to do any work. You’re not even being asked for money. You’re just being asked to say yes to something that already exists.

That’s exactly what makes it effective. Artists who spend hours on a piece and get a handful of likes are primed to respond to anyone who seems to notice. A little attention goes a long way, and scammers know it.

The Build-Up

Once you show interest, they don’t just repost the video. They send over a contract, usually a PDF or a Google Doc link, and ask you to sign it before they can “officially” feature your work. The document is long, filled with dense legal language, and framed as a standard formality that everyone else has already agreed to.

Buried in there is language granting them a broad license to your content, and in the worse versions, a full transfer of ownership. Not a simple permission to repost with credit, but rights to reuse, edit, sublicense, or sell the work, sometimes without ever crediting you again. Because it’s wrapped in legal phrasing and presented as “routine”, a lot of people sign without reading closely, especially if they’re not used to parsing contracts. If you push back or ask questions, that’s often when the small payment offer shows up, meant to make the deal feel more legitimate and to nudge you toward signing quickly before you think it through.

The Steal

The theft isn’t a stolen credit card or a wire transfer. It’s your work itself. Once you sign, you may have legally given away rights to your own art. That opens the door to it being reused in ads, resold to other accounts, or stripped of your name entirely, all without you having any real recourse, because you agreed to it in writing.

Even the twenty-dollar payment can work against you. Some contracts specify that accepting payment counts as agreement to the terms, which makes it harder to argue later that you didn’t understand what you signed. The scam isn’t dramatic. There’s no hacked account or fake invoice. It’s just a contract, written to look boring enough that you stop paying attention exactly when it matters most.

If someone reaches out wanting to repost your work, the safe move is to treat it like any contract from a business you’ve never heard of. Read every line, or better yet have someone else read it too, and don’t sign anything that mentions rights, licensing, or ownership until you fully understand what you’d be giving up. Real exposure isn’t worth losing control of your own work, and a legitimate page will have no problem waiting while you take your time.