Dear NCS Members,
Keep your eyes peeled for scammers targeting cartoonists. NCS past-President Bill Morrison had the following experience with a scammer offering cartoon work, and he luckily picked up on the ruse before it got too far.
If ever you are in doubt about an unsolicited job, always copy and paste some of the email into google to check if it is a phishing scam, or similar. The odds are, other artists have experienced the same thing and hopefully clued in to it.
Stay safe out there!
------------------
Bill's story below:
I was a cartooning scam victim!
I recently had an experience with a scammer that was tailored to me as a cartoonist, and I feel obligated to warn my cartoonist and illustrator friends not to fall for this swindle. It began with an email from a woman, “Heather Hall,” who said she represented a company that wanted to hire me to draw some cartoons for a Covid safety presentation for high school-age kids. The job paid very well and had a generous deadline. A few things seemed odd at first. There was no mention of how the woman found me, and no specific reference to my work or style (and later when I asked her how she found me, she just said “I found you on the internet.” With no specifics such as LinkedIn or Facebook.) Also, no mention of the name of the company she was working for. She referred to them as her “sponsor.” I had a feeling that she was new to the business of hiring artists, so I just chalked it up to inexperience on her part. However, my antennae were up. The phrase “That’s odd.” entered my thoughts consistently during our correspondence, and although I wasn’t immediately thinking “Scam,” I was paying attention.
Once I agreed to do the job, she told me that the company would be sending me a check for the full amount agreed on, and that I could start once I received the check. Now, in all my many years as a professional artist, I have never had a client pay me the full fee up front, so this seemed extremely odd. But still, I thought, “Well, maybe this is how this company works. Just because I’ve never been paid in full up front, that doesn’t mean it never happens.” I’d say an alarm was going off way in the back of my head, but still I was willing to give Heather the benefit of the doubt. I’m sure much of my trust came from the fact that I’m trying to build a freelance business while rehabbing our 110-year old house, and really wanted the money and the work. I wanted to believe!
So, on the morning that the check arrived, I got an email from Heather saying that the company had decided to add a second phase to the job, equal in work to the first phase, and they had doubled the amount of the check! Now I’ve often heard the old adage that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is, so I started asking myself “Why would they pay me in advance for a job in the first place, and then pay me for Phase 2 of the job without seeing how I did on Phase 1?” Also, “Why pay me for the additional work without discussing it with me to see if I was even available to take it on?” On top of this, Heather was very insistent that I let her know when the check had been deposited, and that also seemed unorthodox. Then after I’d put the check in my account, she was very anxious for me to let her know when the funds were available. That didn’t make sense to me. I’ve never had a client so concerned about whether or not a check had been deposited and that I had access to the funds. But maybe they’d had problems with getting another vendor paid and were being overly concerned. It was getting very strange, but at every new development there was a possible explanation for the oddity. And at this point I couldn’t see any danger to me. The check was in my account, and I had eight weeks to complete the simple job. I figured I’d know well before then if the check was bad, and I made a mental not to not start spending the money.
By the way, the check had the logo of the company printed across the upper left, so I finally knew who was hiring me. I looked them up on the web and saw that they were a large architectural firm that does a lot of community outreach and charity. So the fact that they had hired me to do art for a Covid safety presentation for teens fit nicely with what I was seeing. They also seemed like a modern, unorthodox company, doing things in new and exciting ways, so this seemed to explain many of my previous thoughts of “That’s odd. I’ve never heard of someone doing this before.”
Now here’s where everything went off the rails. The morning after I confirmed that the funds were available in my account, I received an email from Heather that stated the following:
“I think we are going to have a little delay with the Phase 2. I just received a message from the sponsor that the Phase 2 should be withheld for now. She decided to cancel the phase 2 until the vaccination exercise has been concluded. Therefore, the second phase of the workshop has been moved to November this year. For this reason, we will only work on the first phase and get it ready before the deadline date.
Please I want you to take all your full payments for the phase 1. I'm giving you $100 more for your stress and your extra time for the work. And for the money for the canceled Phase 2, I want you to wire the funds to the account details of the sponsor. Go to your bank and fill the wire transfer form and then wire the funds to the sponsor's account details provided below.
Please take a snapshot of the Wire Transfer form after the wire transfer has been successfully completed and send it to me.”
My Spidey-Sense immediately started… tingling is not the word. More like hammering. For one thing, this message sounded like it was written by a totally different person from the one I’d been dealing with, but obviously the big red flag here was that she was asking me to wire back half of the fee from my bank account! I told her that I was not comfortable doing that, and she responded, saying she understood and suggested I use “CashApp” to send the money. I told her I didn’t have that app, but would go to my bank and ask them what they recommended for sending the money. Here’s the panicked response I got:
“Your banker has nothing to do with using CashApp. It's a simple app. The funds are there in your account and sending a wire transfer doesn't affect your account in any way. What advise do you need from your banker? Is it how to use CashApp or what exactly do you need. I can guide you.”
I proceeded to go straight to my bank anyway and told them that I suspected check fraud. The banker sat down with me, looked at the scan of the check on her screen, and immediately saw things that didn’t look quite right, such as the name of the bank that the check was drawn from. She got on the phone with their Global Security department and gave the agent all the details of my experience. He said it definitely looks like fraud, and they opened an investigation. The check is most likely bad, and probably not actually from the reputable company whose logo is on the check.
I asked my banker why the funds would be made available to me if the check was possibly bad. Wouldn’t they clear the check and make sure it’s good before releasing the funds? Turns out, nope! She told me that with longtime clients such as myself, with a history of depositing nothing but good checks, they make the funds available within a day, but it could take several more days to determine if the check is good. If it turns out it’s not, they remove the funds from the account.
So, if I had wired half the fee back to the company (in this case, $3,000,) and the check turned out to be bad, I would be out that money.The banker told me to act as if the funds were not in my account until we hear back from Global Security, and to refrain from responding to any messages from “Heather.”
I received a few more urgent messages (“Please, let’s get this taken care of today!”) but I ignored them and they quickly dropped off. She obviously realized I was on to her.
This scam of sending someone a bad check and then requesting a portion of the money wired back to them because of a mistake or a change in the job is not new, but the targeting of cartoonists and illustrators may be. The job that I was offered was very detailed with descriptions of what I was to draw for each illustration, and I’m sure the scammers didn’t devise this just for me. I’m sure others have been and will be targeted. So I’m warning all my cartoonist and illustrator friends to be on the lookout for this scam and don’t fall for it. If someone contacts you with a job offer and things sound a little off, they may be a LOT off. Whatever you do, if you get to the point where someone is asking you to wire or somehow transfer money from your account after they’ve paid you, DON’T DO IT! It’s definitely a scam.
