Many times I’ve received enquiries through Artstation which are obviously fake.
The ones that puzzle me are always some RandomUnremarkableName + Number saying they’re thrilled about my work and want to purchase it. No links, no job offers, no nothing.
Real people always give context as to which piece they want and why or something. I just ignore these weird generic fishy ones and move on.
So what’s the deal with this? Are they just hoping to get my email address so they can sell it as part of a spam mailing list? Or is there something else?
The “RandomUnremarkableName + Number” username format is a clear indicator of the type of person that has very low morals and is quite possibly a scammer or worse. Stay clear of those at any cost.
Unless you want to do crime or hook up. (DM me).
Here, let me pay you $700 for this item that’s worth $500 and you can just send me the extra $200 difference. I have to do it this way because it’s your father’s, brother’s, nephew’s, cousin’s, former roommate’s will and I’m just signing the whole check off to you.
Meanwhile the original check is fake and now you’ve lost the original item AND $200 and the bank is investigating you, and not them.
can you legally accept the check and tell the scammer you are gonna wait until the check fully clears?
Yes, but since you deposited a fake check, they’ll freeze all your bank accounts while they audit and investigate you and everything you do.
It’s very unpleasant.
IMO if the scam angle isn’t obvious, it’s probably pig butchering.
But if the message specifically says they want to buy something from you, I’d be more inclined to guess that it’s some form of refund scam, or maybe a con specifically targeting people with a side hustle.
Pig butchering?
Pretend to make friends with someone after a “wrong number” text, eventually convince them “as a friend” to download a “crypto investing” app which actually just siphons money directly to scammers. John Oliver did a good segment on it.
Pretty much every form of these scams is some kind of advance fee fraud. Two more possible avenues:
- “Upgrade to a business account”. They send you an email purporting to be from the payment provider you used saying you need to upgrade to business to receive a payment that large, and the upgrade page is a fake website run by the scammer that asks for a “refundable deposit” or the like (with a little helping of credit card fraud and of course a business account will require all kinds of personal info useful for identity theft too).
- “But I want it as an NFT” was popular for a bit, they want you to “pre-pay the minting fee but it’s ok I’ll add it to your payment” and then they disappear. But they want it on a website ran by them and the moment you put the crypto in they disappear. Not sure this scam is popular nowadays because NFT screams scam to just about everyone for a lot of different reasons. But “rich guy spends $5000 on dumbass NFT” was a legitimate genre of news for a little moment.
It’s all preying on someone that thinks they got an easy paycheck for work that they’ve already done, on a populace of artists that could really use said paycheck to pay for food and are thus willing to overlook weirdness or principles. They also tend to pick on newer and younger artists that haven’t quite figured out how to run a business yet, hoping that they haven’t heard of scams specifically targeted to their sector.
