Art and Creativity: Dumbfounded by Frauds and Scammers!

Maybe I'm just too naive to live in this world, but sometimes I am truly dumbfounded not just by the degree to which there are scammers and fraudsters operating in the world, but by the places that they will try to scam and defraud people.

This morning, I was doing a little bit of "housekeeping" on my Etsy account — where I have about 200 stones listed for sale — and all of a sudden a new message pops up in the on-site inbox... which is typically reserved for conversations between buyers and sellers.

This particular message identified itself as being "from Etsy customer support" and made some long-winded declaration about my needing to "confirm my account" in order to get payment from a buyer who had evidently bought something and their funds could not be released to me unless I confirmed various pieces of personal information first.

Now, I've been on Etsy for a good 15 years, so I know that that is not how things work. What's more, I pretty much have the highest level account, with the highest level of 2FA security... so I marked the message as spam, after CC'ing a copy of it to somebody I know who actually is Etsy support.

But what if it had landed in the message box of some Etsy neophyte without the experience to recognize that it wasn't authentic?

Overall, though, it made me incredibly sad that there are people out there who are trying to take advantage of "starving artists" and hard-working crafts people. I mean, how low can you stoop?

I suppose I would be less bothered and concerned by the whole thing if this were a single isolated case that only popped up maybe once a year or something. But there's a steady stream of these kinds of messages coming from all corners... they come in from Etsy, from eBay, from PayPal and from various other sources. Seems like the "industry" we might describe as "defrauding people" is alive and well!

To Etsy's credit, they're usually pretty good at getting on top of these things, and that held true this time, as well... because even as I was going to send a "nastygram" back to the fraudster, the account had already been purged from the system.

But even so, it's annoying to have to put so much of our energy into detecting whether somebody who (supposedly) has an interest in our work is trying to buy from us or defraud us.

What kind of world is this, that we have created for ourselves?

And yes, I'm well aware that there have been various kinds of scammers and "snake oil salesmen" in the world for a really long time. Maybe it just feels so much more prolific because it has become a whole — largely automated — industry, in this day and age!

Be careful out there, folks!

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If you enjoy painted rocks, do check out The Hive Rocks Project and help spread the word about Hive, while also being creative!

Because I am trying to make some semblance of income — a part time living, even — I now add this footer to all my posts, in the hope that someone, somewhere, might decide to take a further look at my work, and perhaps consider supporting independent art.

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2024.01.21 AS-TXT-194/162