BogusArtFair.Info

It's been quiet here for a while, but I got another tip that the shipping scams are still alive and "well". Here's another one to look out for:

An Austrian artist, Ewald Hotz, was recently contacted by ATcultura too. While I assumed it was a vantiy press, Ewald went through the trouble of obtaining an application form to prove this. A Google search for the show also returns less than promising results.

Not a lot of major scams have been coming through my email lately (although I'm sure they're still happening). This morning, CBC reported that some email accounts are being hacked and fake SOS emails are being sent out from them. Less than an hour later, I received the following email from one of my business contacts' email addresses:

Subject: I need your favor

This scammer has been burning a hole in my inbox for a while, but for one reason or another, I kept getting distracted from posting it. This is a two-parter, with the "buyer" and "shipper" sending the emails to an artist (who, luckily, knew what was going on):

I've been very behind on my blog reading (i.e. have mostly stopped reading them in the fall), so I almost missed Art News Blog's example of an art scammer. Thanks to Clint Watson for sharing it on Twitter!

Art Calendar has a great article about vanity galleries. Thanks to Karen Miranda Augustine for the link!

An emerging artist from Canada has sent me an email she received from "Anderson Wouoth". The email screams scam; some of the tell-tale signs are:

• asking for multiple works, clearly pulling the descriptions off a website
• offering to send the cheque in the very first email
• asking for contact information in the very first email
• slightly broken English that attempts to be formal

Back in August, I had a request to review DeviantArt's policies. The requester was concerned that "They don't give a cut off date for how long they can use your images for promotional material for their site." It's been a few months since I had time to read their boilerplates thoroughly, so I'm not sure whether what is available now was available in August.

Every time I think the scammers who target artists are moving on, I hear of another one. I guess they just know better than to send me emails now.

Our latest scammer is "Anderson Wuouth", using the address andersonwuouth@yahoo.se, and requests that the artwork be sent to the following address: Anderson Wuouth, Hirsackerstrasse 64, Postfach 324, CH-8810 Horgen, Switzerland.

I don't even quite know how to categorize this one. These guys are obviously not Princeton, and I'm surprised Princeton isn't trying to shut them down (or maybe they are, and I just don't know about it).