Artist Scam Alert · 10:40pm February 24th
Dear Bronies and Pegasisters,
By now some of you may have noticed there has been an uptick in these scams where you may get posted through your PMs or in the comments about how someone is interested in bringing your stories to life through a comic and found it so inspirational that they're interested in doing a comic once a week and they just want to talk to you over Discord.
Take it from me - this is a scam. These people will charge you hundreds, and even if you do get a commission from them that might be half decent, I promise you that in a week or two, they will come to you with a sob story of some kind to beg you for money, even if you made it clear that you don't have much to give in the first place.
I know this because I had, admittingly, been tricked by this once before.
So, to combat this, I've decided to do two things: First, whenever any of these messages pop up, I take a screenshot. I do this because the account that sends these messages will be gone within a week. And most of them were created relatively recently - like on the same day they sent you the message.
The second is on my blog, I'll be doing a new segment that I like to call. Artist Scam Alert. Whenever I get one of these, I will be posting them here in order to warn all of you of a potential scammer running about.
So, without further ado, here's my collection.
Signed,
- CrackedInkWell.
advertisers and scamers really are the scum of the earth
I've encountered one of these already. The discord conversation with them was interesting, but it was clear they were using text-generation AI. I was suspicious when they contacted me over my most recent story that performed badly, rather than my main story which does well.
To verify that they were actually a reader of the story and not a bot, I asked them to describe their favourite part, in which they gave a clearly AI-generated, generic fantasy description that said nothing and didn't match the story. When I asked them to give a random pony related fact, they told me one about the height of real ponies, rather than mlp; then they got mad that I wasn't giving them an actual question to answer when I pointed out that it was not relevant to mlp.
Note that they do provide an actual artist portfolio (though it's possible they just chose one at random to link to). The one they sent me had a suspicious lack of pony art, despite them offering to do art for a pony story. When asked about it, they then sent some AI-generated pony sample images.
I've been getting those, but on Fanfiction.net. My guess is that both sites are being hit by spam bots.
Thanks for the heads up.
Thanks. Explains the message I got - figured it was a scam. I was suspicious so I didn't add them to Discord but asked them to tell me what their favorite parts of my stories were. What was wild was they actually took a tiny bit of time to skim through one of my smut stories. Not the one I would've wanted turned into a comic, but I WAS impressed they took the time to read through a two-chapter smut story enough they could list off what they enjoyed about it.