General Chat

If you are an artist, watch out for this nasty scam.

There is a very unpleasant scam going around preying on possibly unsuspecting artists. It tends to follow the same pattern though the details may change slightly. Basically the con works like this. An email arrives telling you how great your work is and how much the sender would love to buy some work. It often needs to be bought quickly because of a special occasion. The “buyer” wants to pay a lot of money (i.e. hundreds or thousands of pounds) and intends either to buy several pieces or wants the artist to send 3 or 4 so he/she can choose. The buyer will pay for shipping and sends a big fat cheque. The unsuspecting artist (who may sometimes sell work through the Internet and hasn’t perhaps seen this scam before) banks the cheque and sends off the art works. The artist is delighted that at last they are receiving the recognition they have dreamed of! The scammer then says Ooops they gave too much money and shipping isn’t as much as they thought. They ask for some money to be returned. The naive artist sends back a cheque and then discovers that the buyer’s cheque is worthless and so the artist has lost money and pieces of work. A lot of these are coming in from Nigeria and the poor English is a clue that it could be dodgy but a number of artists have been taken in by this. I’ve had variations of this sent to me several times now and luckily I realised what it was. I haven’t had the nerve to do what one artist I heard did…….that one told the “Buyer” that his bank required a handling fee before it could process the payment money and so he scammed the scammers but I think that might be a bit dangerous! The moral of the story is “If it sounds too good to be true…….it is!” Sue