As I’m fed up with daily scams reaching my inbox, I’ve decided to list some of the most annoying ones here. When you’re new to these messages, it’s easy to get scammed but when you get several similar ones in a day, it becomes much easier to spot, report and block them on Instagram! Below you’ll find the screenshots from my direct messages and comments scammers leave on my Instagram account . The sad part of all of this is that these scammers target artists they want to take advantage of because we’re naïve and trusting and want to sell our art.
#1 Buying followers scams.
There’re two kinds of scams. They either sell you followers for your money or they provide you with a service selling “real and engaged” followers. The end result is that you spend your money and all new followers disappear from your account amazingly quickly. In the first instance, you buy ‘engagement’ but the engaged followers come from bots of India and Pakistan. It’s a scam that won’t give you real followers.
In the second instance, Instagram scams involve service companies. Service companies like Trusy Social masquerade as legit companies but they are not. Trusy Social claims to provide a service to accelerate Instagram growth by delivering “real and engaged followers that are not bots or fake accounts” with ” hyper niche targeting”. This service claim was written on the front page of their site. I tried their service in February-March, 2022. After I started a 2-month subscription to their service I did see a boost of activity on my posts. However these were done by fake accounts. Trusy also added fake followers, not the real ones as was promised. Those new followers began to disappear daily off of my account when I stopped monthly payments. Every such account stated that the “user is not found”. In a few months I was free of all fake followers losing all the money I paid for zero real followers. While I thought I paid for a plan to get real engagement, accounts and followers, I got a bunch of fake accounts that left as quick as they appeared. Btw there is no expert advice or hyper niche targeting of users either. None. The only true promise was a responsive account manager so that my emails were answered quickly. I paid using PayPal, opened a case and lost it because their policy said that the company ‘provided me with service’. So don’t fall for something that can’t be true. Don’t pay for followers.
#2 Art collectors interested to purchase your art as the NFTs.
These are incredibly annoying scams. They offer you good money to purchase your art as NFTs. They send you to a website where you need to make your NFTs either paying for them so they can purchase the nfts from you or to connect your wallet and they steal your money. Block and Report such accounts! The NFT is the real thing but the market crashed last year with the stock market crash and now Instagram is flooded with these NFT art collector scams.
There’s another version of this when they invite you to a crypto trade.
#3 PR firms selling you PR service writing an article on a big news site like LA Weekly.
The problem is that their writers don’t really work for the company and at best, you’re buying an expensive spot in an article that may appear as sponsored ad. My guess these articles don’t stay up for long either. The cost of the spot is over $600 according to Mogul Press’s outreach specialist! But ‘if budget is an issue’ it’s just $450.
#4 Buying art as an anniversary gift
I’m also getting emails that look like so:
“Hello There,
My name is Stefany Lee from Miami Fl, i actually observed my husband has been viewing your website on my laptop and i guess he likes your piece of work. I’m also impressed and amazed to have seen your various works too, you are doing a great job. I would like to purchase ” Blue Lily Dream, colored pencil drawing $2,300 ” as a surprise to my husband on our anniversary. Also , let me know if you accept CHECK as mode of payment.
Thanks and best regards. Steffany Lee“
These are fishing scams as the want to send you big checks for your art. To make it short, you won’t be able to cash this check because it will bounce, and you might spend around $200 paying for shipping to a non-existing shipping company they ask you to ship through. That’s how they make money…Collecting $ from artists…
I’m also getting messages from ‘light workers’, palm readers, illuminati people, etc. All of them try to scam you out of your hard-earned money!
#5 Hacking your account
Finally, I’d like to warn you about various apps that ask you to log in using your Instagram, Facebook or google accounts. Many of these apps take your log in information and hack your account! Be super careful because you can lose your account in no time and these social companies don’t restore them. Install a two-step verification logging in. At least you decrease the chance of the account hack this way.
My facebook account got hacked because I logged in to INShot photo editing app using my facebook log in. I had to change my log in several times a day being notified of suspicious activity after that. They broke into my account in the middle of the night anyways, took my money, posted and advertised on Facebook on my behalf. The scam doesn’t stop here.
Hackers who hack your account pretend that they are you and try to scam your followers via direct messages. I got messages from a few accounts I followed and they asked me to go to a specific site or to give them my phone or to vote for them on a weird site. These messages sounded strange to me because I knew the people whose accounts got hacked. It’s easy to get caught in this if you’re not vigilant about the scams.
I’m going to update this post with new scam alerts in the future. My hope is that you manage to avoid falling into a web of horrible people who prey on artists to scam. If you’d like to share your scam alert, reach me on Instagram.
If you’d like to check out my work, go here: visionary art for sale.
