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?

  • chameleon
    4•5 months ago

    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.