If you are a photographer selling your services or your work, as a full -time or even a side hustle, an active scam is still going around, about which you must definitely be aware. The good news is that if you know how it works, it is easy to save yourself against it.
Imagine your enthusiasm …
Imagine your enthusiasm when you get an email whether you are available on a certain date to take a wedding or a picture of an event. The initial email details can be somewhat scary if they only want to check your availability, or it can have a lot of seductive information about the event, possibly some later you have something about buying prints and photo books. Either way, once they send you all the details, it looks like a very sweet gig that provides a similar sweet payday for you as a photographer.
On the surface, at least…
This has really happened to me recently, and – Spiiler Alert – I was fortunately able to avoid getting out of any money because I believed what was happening on time to stop it. However, I was not as careful as I usually replies to new customers – I dropped my guard to some extent and let it go too far before stopping it. I am going to tell you how this scam works, how to identify and avoid it, and when I failed to trust my intestine, what did I do wrong, which was already telling me that something was wrong.
Here’s how the scam works
The scammer, presents as a potential customer for your photography business, interrogates your availability, emails your needs for your services for an event soon, and you settled with them at a price. When you ask for deposits (I usually charge 50% upfront to schedule a wedding or a photoshoot like an event), they will tell you that they only handle the transaction with a check. If you agree with this situation, they will send you a check or a check for the entire amount. You deposit checks in your bank, and it is clean within a day or two, in which funds available in your account appear.
They can then ask you to confirm that you have received payment, and it is further preparation.
Very soon to approve the payment in your bank, the scammer will send you an email, such as “our available budget is reduced,”, or if the payment includes some upfront costs such as rental or materials, they can say something, “You are going to take care of ourselves from the end instead of paying these items. ,
Whatever the excuse, the original message from the scammer is that the gig is still on, but they need to return the share of the payment sent by you, which are sent to their end due to some changes.
At this point, you probably believe that since the gig is still on and you already have a large part of their money, they have no problem to return a part of it – especially if they are still hanging in front of you. Correct?
Wrong.
What happens if you go with the scam
If you go with this scam, what happens here: you send them refunds from your account, and then you never listen to them again. Worse, when you examine your bank account, you will see that their initial payment has been mysteriously evaporated, and now you are out of the value of the “refund” you have sent them.
The scam is a large -scale version of the old “Money in a envelope” scam, in which the scammer gives you a bunch of money in an envelope as payment for something, but they tell you that it is a few dollars and asks you, ask for $ 20, ask for $ 20 that they will leave and when you will hold the lifelope with the rest. The scammer disappears with your $ 20, and you catch an empty envelope that they assured that you are full of money.
The way this bank works with the check version is that the bank will often clean the check and make those funds available to you before paying those funds actually. When the payment in the payment bank physically fails, your bank cancels check transactions, and the “clearer” funds received as paid by you disappear from your account.
Armed with this information about how this scam works, it gives us the first red flag to see that these scammers reach you.
Red flag #1: future customer says they only handle transactions with checks
In my case, I got all the way at the point where I had deposited their check, confirmed the payment with them, and then obtained the email that I assured me that the gig was still on, but was asking me for a partial return. When I saw the email, I wanted to slap myself to be such a knuckle and let my guard go down. There were red flags on the way to this moment, so I was very less careful than was generally less careful while working with potentially new customers?
There is no excuse here – it is completely on me because I was not as careful as I should have had. When I was away, the scammers emailed me, and I collapsed a hasty response for them as it looked like a good gig. I did not have access to my main computer, and our initial email exchange was through my phone.
Red Flag #2: It is difficult to verify the customer’s identity online
If I was at my desk at home, what I would do immediately do immediately, I send my new client form, which requires their contact details including addresses and phone numbers. This is not a foolish way to smell scammers, but whoever speaks to share these details should be considered with doubt. When I work properly on new customers, I use this information to verify their identity. I also like to talk to them on the phone before. Certainly, scammers can get a burner phone with temporary numbers and use fake addresses, but it is too much trouble to go, and it is probably not worth them, while they stand for the amount of money you have made.
Needless to say, because I was far away and responded in a hurry, I left this process and learned in a very good way that there was a very good reason that I started doing it in the first place.
I will usually look at the customer as a quick and dirty form of identity verification using social media and other sources. If a professional person, for example, there is no appearance online on sites such as LinkedIn, it is a red flag. In this recent case, I could not find out who this potential customer was from any online sources, and since I had no phone number for them, I could not talk to them directly. This stopped me, and I should have emphasized that they share more contact details with me before proceeding. My mistake.
Red Flag #3: Customer feels unconnected with budget and adds additional services
My future customer never pushed back to costs and while we were interacting, the proposal added extra like print and photo books. This makes sense, of course, if you wonder how the scam works. The larger their initial payment for you, the larger the “refund” they can demand when they can tell you that “things have changed” at their end. And it brings me to the red flag number four.
Red Flag #4: They send you an initial payment that you sought bigger than you sought
In my case, I asked for 50% deposit, but they insisted on sending me full amount. Of course they will do initial payment = big “refunds”!
In my recent conversation with the scammers, I refused to send him a refund and went to his bank instead to tell them what happened. He confirmed that the check I had deposited in my account through mobile deposits using my phone was a fake (some security facilities on the check did not pass the sniff test). He held a grip on payment so that the money would no longer be seen as a fund available in my account and logged it as a financial scam with their fraud department.
At the end of the day, I was very lucky that, despite going down my guard down and behaving like a knockhead, whatever I lost was some time with scammers and in my bank email thread. To avoid this problem, I just needed to do so that he was refusing to take a check – something that I will always do from now! This can be very bad for me, but I am sharing it with all of you in the hope that my caution story can help prevent you from taking it from this scam.
