Beware of this scams!

The NFT Scam

I experienced this some time ago on the community site Deviant Art, and more recently on Instagram. You really have to be careful on the Internet, nothing new under the sun... Billions disappear every year and there will always be new scams, and gullible or uninformed people who fall into the traps of scammers, unfortunately.

Here's the method used by the scammers: one of them will contact you with a fake profile, often new, and then compliment you on one or more of your works, illustrations, drawings, or paintings. Little by little, he will also show interest in buying several of them in the form of NFTs, often for a very tempting or even exorbitant amount. It can't be said enough: if it's too good to be true, it's not true! In some cases, the scammer will want to continue the conversation on Telegram, just to be sure not to be traced.

Where the real scam lies is that he will send you a link to an NFT platform, more or less well presented, but -without going into technical details- most often with a lot of flaws for those who know how to analyze a website properly. Obviously, this is not a real platform, most of the time they have no social networks or anything else and no one has ever heard of them. A real platform has the means to make itself known: it raises millions in funding, does marketing, etc. In short, do not connect a wallet like Metamask because the goal is of course to empty your accounts in one way or another!

The Paypal Scam

This one happened to me on Instagram, and I'm almost certain that others will contact me to try it. Someone, often with a recent account, will show interest in placing an artistic order with you, a drawing, a painting, or what have you. Well, I'll spare you the details on the nonsense they are capable of spouting to try to lead you astray: their unspoken goal is to make you believe in a Paypal transaction that has gone wrong, of course after asking for your full name and email address. They will try to change the password by asking for the Paypal notification code... Don't be naive.

As for me, fortunately after all these years on the Internet, and even more so having trained myself on many subjects, I have become very suspicious so as soon as someone contacts me and I have a bad feeling, I do a search to see if there might not be a new scam going on: I let them talk to find out where they're going, then I block them or troll them a little.

For further reading:

Instagram and Paypal scams