"Son of a Bitch."
Scammers are so touchy. Geeze. I am trying to do him a favor, and then he curses me out.
Now, if you are unsure what just happened in that conversation, hang in there ... Read more inside...
The over-payment scam is such a pervasive scam, that you might think everyone has heard about it, and is immune to it. Yet, I often enough see this come up as a question in a Facebook group - where a photographer is unsure if an enquiry is a scam. Most often they are. This is how these advance-fee scams work, and how photographers are scammed:
The scammer will overpay you, and you have to pay the difference to another vendor, whether the florist or model, or whatever. There is no florist / model / whatever - the other vendor is in Read more inside...
Scam - Domain name registration / SEO service registration
As if the e-mail scams aren't bad enough, they are now texting photographers with the same scam! But there is another scam that has been going around for years now - but it is so obvious that I doubt many people will fall for it. But just in case anyone has any doubt, or may be a touch too inattentive, this next one is also a scam - fake domain renewals / SEO service registration.
If you have a website - and this means everyone - then you have received these emails, warning you to renew your domain. There are also Read more inside...
This is one of the most ironic things about wannabe professional photographers - while they invariably claim to be original and artistic, they flounder when it comes to writing text for their websites. Then they fall back on the old cntl-C / cntl-V trick, or in this example, be just as lazy and stay with what appears to be the generic text on a website template.
Just click on the image above, and be astonished. Count the pages and then be even more astonished.
The long and the short of this is that there is no short-cut. Do your own Read more inside...
In a previous article on how e-mail scammers are targeting photographers, the question came up exactly how the photographer is going to lose money. What exactly is the system the scammers have in place where the photographer is going to be out of pocket?
The over-payment scam works on the principle that the scammer books you but overpays you, and then asks you to pay the difference to another vendor. So you send money to the "other vendor" (who is actually the scammer). The transaction where you got paid the money turns out to be Read more inside...
Wedding photography - Where to start building a portfolio
I do get some interesting emails and Facebook messages. The strange ones run the whole range from trippy & bizarre, all the way to obscure. One of my favorite weird emails was one that had the title, "Nikon D100" with the body of the email simply asking, "How do you do that?"
This morning, I saw news that Facebook is once again altering things, including the way that messages are delivered. Paid messages from strangers now seem to be on the horizon. So with that, for the first time in forever, I went through the backlog Read more inside...
Photographers are more and more becoming the target for scammers and con artists. They come in all kinds of ways. Really, it's the Wild West out there! The most prevalent scam is the over-payment scam where the photographer is asked if they are available for a date ... and they just want to throw money at you and book you, without even finding out details.
One of the things that reveal them, is the phrasing. For example, if they say "your city", then it is 100% guaranteed to be a scam. Other vague descriptions like that should also start the Read more inside...
In addition to the commonly found over-payment scams that target photographers, and the Scam: Domain name registration / SEO service registration scams, there are scams that try to sell you domain names they don't own.
Here is an example that crops up regularly, where a domain with important keywords is offered for sale. WebnameSolution is just one of the companies that try their devious hand at this.
The best advice I can give here, is that you do your homework first and find out who actually owns the domain name! Do a whois on the domain, Read more inside...
You know you've arrived when other photographers start ripping off your images and text from your website. I was double lucky here - my entire website was appropriated by another photographer.
How I discovered this - a friend let me know that when googling my name, there is a link that comes up with another photographer's website. So I checked it, and sure enough - there it is with some of my images, and a copy of the original HTML-based design of my website, One Perfect Moment, as it appeared at the time. My entire website ripped Read more inside...
