new scam just dropped
We know of the scammers that dwell on Discord, Twitter, or Bsky, and ask you to commission them, either giving you an AI generated picture or charging you 300$ and giving you something they commissioned on Fiverr for 5$ . I literally have a whole-ass guide on them. Then there's the ones who ask for commissions, trying to get you to draw their pet or whatever, then sending you a fake cheque or something, which has been very common on Tumblr. This post explains it well.
But now we're bringing the first type of scam (where someone tries to force you to commission them) onto tumblr! Our buddy miruuuwuu here is going to provide a really good example. Let's start with the circumstances this happened in. I got two DMs from this account, who had followed me few minutes prior to DMing. As always, I checked their profile first.
Few things to note in here that already told me this was a scammer: The account had a grand total of two posts in their profile, posted four hours ago. Nothing else. Completely empty account. The "femenine" name and the anime pfp already were kinda suspicious alongside this. A large portion of the "commission me" scammers will have a generic anime profile picture and a woman's name. The generic-ass description didn't help.
And well, since I haven't got this type of scammer on tumblr before, I decided to go along with it, because there's something inherently funny about some scammer trying this with someone who's specifically been doing guides about scammers for years. You will notice that my responses are rather mean, which... ngl I like being sassy about scammers what can I say
First initial impression: This person was trying very hard to try to be friends with me. Very weird from a complete random who just followed. The weirdest part here is, of course, how they instantly dismiss me saying "I'm not sure I think" about their random attempts to be like "you're my friend now" and simply proceed with their script. Now, this scammer is SLIGHTLY more specific than usual, since they mentioned DnD- which is closer to my interests than they tend to target. So uh, props to that I guess.
They inmediately tried to inquiry about my character. At this point, I know they'd be offering to draw them for money. I know these scammers tend to steal people's art as examples, so I just grabbed some shitty AI-generated tiefling from google. If they steal that and then try to use it as an example for someone else, I hope they can easily realize this is a scam. Notice how little they care about me being very rude and short-responsed: They're following a script. Afterwards, they sent me an example of "their OC". Alongside a massive AI-generated backstory that has no relation whatsoever to the character, which is supposedly a half elf.
I decide to poke a bit about it. Their response is pretty detached to someone who would actually know about RP or anything. "My setting's elves are green" would've been great. But nope, they immediately jump to trying to share me more examples of their art, and send me about 6-7 pictures in rapid fire. Some of them stolen, some of them traced, some of them commissioned from people in Fiverr for five bucks.
And then we jump immediately to the core of the scam: asking me to commission them. I already knew this was coming, but let's go for it. Their entire massive blurb on how they "work on paid and unpaid platforms" is extremely unhinged to read as an artist myself, but sure, whatever they wanna use to tell me why I gotta pay them. THE CRUCIAL PART HERE IS: YOU SHOULD NEVER COMMISSION PEOPLE WHO DMED YOU FIRST AT RANDOM! I have seen WAY too many people fall for this. If an "artist" DMs you to ask you to commission them, block them! Legitimate artists WON'T do that unprompted! I have way more information in the guide I linked in the first paragraph, but yeah.
At this point, these scams tend to go in different ways. If you insist you can't pay for them, they often will jump to guilt tripping you, or bringing some sob story on how they need money desperately. We had one in our Discord trying to convince two different people to commission them with entirely different stories (one of them was "I need to buy a gift for my wife" and the other one was "i need to buy hearing aids ASAP!!!"). DO NOT FALL FOR THESE SOB STORIES. They're just trying to get you to feel bad and agree even if you're suspicious.
This is the point where I just stopped going ahead with the conversation. They will try to haggle you. You tell them you have 100 bucks, they'll try to raise 150. A lot of artists online tend to have a pricing guide, a website, some sort of TOS kinda stuff. They won't try to see how much they can milk out of you by testing the waters. Again, please check out this guide if you're suspecting anything weird, or even feel free to DM me if you need someone to double check. Don't put your money on these scams: They will either run with your money, commission someone in the global south on fiverr for literal cents, or they'll just get you some AI generated mess.
Anyways, many thanks to miruuuwuu for helping me put together this post, very kind of them to let me know this scam is now coming on tumblr too!