Creative Cogitation

So a few days ago some­one con­tacts me express­ing inter­est in one of my new paint­ings, “Retweet.”  It’s not out of left field, when I showed it  a few weeks ago there was some inter­est in it.  This per­son says they want to buy it.

So I thank her for her inter­est in my art, I give them my usual spiel about how easy it is to buy using the Pay­Pal but­ton, give her a link, and then advise her that the ship­ping price quoted is for FedEx Home Deliv­ery in the con­ti­nen­tal US.  If she needs it shipped else­where then the ship­ping rates could change, and that cus­toms fees etc are her respon­si­bil­ity. I also tell her I will remove it from the stretcher bars and ship it in a tube if she likes (which can save a bunch on dimen­sional ship­ping weight charges), but that she will have to find and pay some­body on her end to re-stretch it.

She writes back say­ing she would like to pro­ceed with the pur­chase for the orig­i­nal work (framed).  Also she would my address, phone num­ber and name so she can pay me by cer­ti­fied check. She wants to use a local cartage com­pany to ship the work from the US to South Africa.

Umm — she should have my name and phone num­ber already. Its right there in my reply.  So already I am expect­ing that a scammer’s bot responded to me.

I do advise her the work is unframed as it is a gallery wrapped can­vas painted on the edges so that it can be hung with­out a frame.

There are some peo­ple out there who do not real­ize the preva­lence of check fraud includ­ing bogus cer­ti­fied checks (and I have done busi­ness with them) & who like to have infor­ma­tion spoon fed to them. On the off chance a real art afi­cionado is on the other end of this com­mu­ni­ca­tion, I respond with my next bit about check fraud, hold­ing peri­ods, find­ing a bank to write the check with affil­i­ates local to the Phoenix Metro area (so I can com­plete the trans­ac­tion at the bank the check is writ­ten on) and sug­gest if that all makes her uncom­fort­able that I am will­ing to work with a rep­utable escrow ser­vice or bank escrow ser­vice.  I thank her again for her inter­est in my art.

Because the sec­ond con­tact had all the usual ele­ments of a com­mon art & check fraud scam: The cartage com­pany & a cover story as to why all of this had to be exe­cuted in the man­ner pro­posed i.e. husband’s com­pany sud­denly dis­placed them from their home in the US to some­place abroad-usually in Africa,  I really do not expect to hear back from her, and of course I haven’t.

The next stage of this scam would have involved me deposit­ing her check at my own bank — the check prob­a­bly would have been writ­ten for too much money and she would have wanted me to refund the excess to the guy who shows up for the paint­ing.  Later on the bogus check would bounce and I would be out the money and the painting.

I’ve had to go find a paint­ing and repos­sess it after a per­son pur­chased one with rub­ber check drawn on a local bank-it took 14 days for the check to bounce-she put a stop pay­ment on it.  I don’t even want to think about how long it would take an inter­na­tional check to bounce.   So when one of the fraud­sters makes me waste even 5 min­utes of my time, I get a lit­tle aggravated.

Have you been approached by some­one attempt­ing an art or check fraud scam, are you the vic­tim of one?  Do tell.  I am sure oth­ers would like to learn more about vari­a­tions on this theme so they are bet­ter edu­cated on what to look out for.

Yours in art,

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.