How to Scam an Artist

Modern life means that we all need to be on the lookout for scams. We are wary when a ‘friend’ sends an email saying that they have been mugged in Barcelona, and could we please send money to pay their hotel bill. But some scams target artists in particular.

All artists are happy when someone approaches and says they love your work. There used to be an email where a ‘collector’ would claim to like a certain piece, pay the artist more than the agreed price, then say there had been a mistake, and would the artist kindly refund the excess? The money would appear to have been deposited in their bank account, but wasn’t actually there in the days of slow banking.

A red flag is vague text such as ‘Your work captivates me! It is so powerful and warm.’ ‘My wife’s birthday is coming up, and I want to surprise her with a work of art.’

Then there is an invitation to show your work in, say, Venice. Sounds great, but it turns out that you will bear all the costs, and the venue is a shop.

Or else someone says they want to buy your work, but they mean that they want to turn it into non-fungible tokens. I understand that the only way to make money on NFTs is to convince a collector that they should pay more than another collector bought it for.

Lately I had an enquiry extolling the quality of one of my tapestries from a Johnson Adler. Of course I looked this name up, but unfortunately there is no one with that name. He also gave a phone number and suggested I might like to contact him via WhatsApp, signing off with ‘warm regards’. So was this going to be a romance scam? My email reply with all the details he asked for went unanswered.

Even more recently, there have been more mysterious potential scams. On my website, people are invited to fill in a form if they want further information. I have had a couple with seemingly AI-generated weird incoherence, then now one which says: ‘Aloha, makemake wau eʻike i kāu kumukūʻai,’ Hawaiian for ‘Hello, I would like to know your price.’ It seems there are merely two thousand people who speak Hawaiian – why should anyone think I am one of them?