My guess is that almost everyone who has an 'art' website gets those e-mails: "Hello. I am loving your arts! Please to be contacting me for sales!" You can tell immediately that these are not legitimate fans of your work.
But this particular inquiry seemed perfectly normal: "We are real fans of your photography. Do you ever sell any of your work?" A few more exchanges and she had picked out a couple of nice shots off from this web site. I printed them up, carefully packaged, and sent them off, insured, priority mail. Now I don't do this for a living so I am probably not as careful as I should be. I essentially trust people to eventually send a check. My prices are very modest (I charge 25 cents a square inch, so for example a 16x20 print would be $80.) So I figure that at worst I'll be out the cost of paper, ink, postage and time.
Probably what screwed up their scam is that my prices are so low, such that when I received a cashier's check for $3000 I knew immediately that it was a scam. If I were charging $1000 per print, I might figure the extra money was a tip? Not sure, but I immediately called the bank listed on the check and they verified that it was a fake. I assumed that I would eventually hear from the 'buyer' that they had accidently overpayed, and could I send back a check for the balance? That's the standard scam. But I never heard back....so I assume that they figured out that I was onto them. My guess is that they target dozens of artists, hoping that just one or two will be amazingly naive.
What really irks me, though, is that she had pretty good taste, and actually ordered a couple of really nice prints....including this one that I had never carefully printed before. This was taken one morning high in the Rockies, on my faithful old Pentax 6x7. Velvia 100 film.
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