Gone Phishin': What Graphic Designers Need to Know About a Weird Internet Scam Targeting Creatives
Most of us have seen phishing emails—maybe a dodgy e-mail address asking about details for a bank you don’t even use, or badly spelled requests to reset a password on an Amazon or Netflix account. They’re nothing new—for as long as the internet has existed, people have found ways to exploit others through it—now, it turns out there are scammers specifically dedicated to targeting the graphic design community. When a reader got in touch with his own experience of an attempted scam, it turned out numerous others had been targeted in the same way. Google “graphic design email scam”, and you’ll find a thread on Reddit from December 2018, with many others describing exactly the same experience.
To get a better understanding of the scam, we spoke to Californian intellectual property lawyer Leslie Burns. “The scammer makes it look more legit since he (guessing it’s a guy) offers to pay via credit card, but then he rescinds or cancels the transaction,”she says. “Another possibility is that the scammer is using a stolen credit card number. The payment would then appear but later will get flagged or cancelled when the fact that the credit card number was fake or stolen is discovered. By then, the scammer has his money.”
“They’re called 'phishing' attacks because, like baiting a lure, they won’t work unless you bite.”
“It’s pretty easy to tell a scam when they just dump the entire project on you and never mention cost,” one Reddit poster pointed out. “Also, the grammar is a dead giveaway.’ But despite the red flags, it’s somewhat understandable when someone falls for these scams: There’s the promise of a large pay-check, for one, and many designers are used to doing a good amount of prep work in dealing with a potential client before the design work—or the paid time—even starts. We got curious: What is this scam exactly? What’s the end game? How can scammers possibly profit from asking you to make a logo design? So we tried to scam the scammer, setting up an email address, assuming a chipper character called “Beth Williams,” and reaching out to one of the email addresses that cropped up time and again.
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