The "Dead Child" Scam

If you’ve been making art long enough to build any kind of public presence, you’ve probably gotten a message that felt a little too good to be true. Maybe they’re offering you free supplies or equipment worth thousands of dollars. Whatever the pitch, there’s a pattern behind it, and once you’ve seen it once, you start spotting it everywhere.

Here’s how it usually plays out.

The Hook

It starts with a message out of nowhere, from someone you’ve never talked to. The message either flatters you directly, telling you your work is incredible, exactly what they’ve been looking for, or it dangles something valuable for a reason that seems almost too kind to question.

A real example: an art gallery got an email from a woman offering a nearly new kiln, worth about four thousand dollars, for free. Her reasoning was that her son had died and she wanted the kiln to go to someone who would actually use it. It’s a gut punch of a story. Grief and generosity make people lower their guard fast. Nobody wants to interrogate a grieving mother over a free kiln.

The dollar amount matters here too. It’s never a modest, believable number. It’s big enough to make you sit up, but not so outlandish that it feels obviously fake at first glance. Four thousand dollars in free equipment is exactly that sweet spot.

The Build-Up

Once you respond, the scammer needs to keep you engaged without giving you anything solid to check. Watch how they answer basic questions. When the gallery asked where the woman was located, she gave only a state, nothing more specific, even though she claimed to be delivering or shipping a physical kiln. When the gallery mentioned their own location, it turned out she was fifteen hundred miles away.

Think about that for a second. Someone offers to hand over a large piece of equipment to a specific business, but doesn’t know where that business is. That’s not how a real transaction works. A real person giving away a kiln to a specific gallery would know, or at least ask early, where they’re sending it and how.

This vagueness isn’t an accident. It’s a way of staying flexible so the story can shift depending on how you respond. If you’d said you were nearby, the story might have changed to match. The goal in this stage is to keep you invested and moving forward without pinning down any detail that could be verified or that could expose a hole in the story.

The Steal

This is where the money actually changes hands, and it almost always comes wrapped in a reasonable-sounding request. With a “free” item scam, it’s usually shipping costs, paid upfront, for an item that never arrives. With a commission or purchase scam, it’s an overpayment by check or transfer, followed by a request to refund the difference before the original payment turns out to be fake. Either way, you end up sending real money to someone who was never planning to send you anything back.

The good news is that most of these scams fall apart under about five minutes of basic scrutiny. Google the name. Ask a specific question about location or logistics and see if the answer lines up. Notice if someone offering you something valuable seems oddly uninterested in the practical details of actually getting it to you.

If your art is genuinely good, people will notice it in ways that feel earned, not like a windfall landing in your inbox. When an offer skips straight to flattery or free money without any of the normal friction of a real transaction, that’s worth pausing on. A little healthy suspicion costs you nothing. A wired shipping fee for a kiln that never existed costs a lot more.