Ton of them on DA, a lot of them use very similar methods which made me wonder if it's a loosely organised group. I like to chat with them for a bit until I get bored.

- Kinda pushy, check,
- Claim X years of experience in Y different themes; has a virtually empty gallery, no real portfolio/price sheet, and has to be fought tooth and nail for more examples,
- Lots of AI - AI-written pic descriptions ( "This image appears to depict...") and bios,
- Oddly enough, I didn't see much stolen art, not that I was able to identify. But definitely a bunch of AI images and AI backgrounds,
- Uploaded commissions are always 'for a client', no link to any customer's account,
- Always claim to be female, almost always claim to be American. English is fluent but doesn't seem native. I'd be interested to know where they are from,
- The ones I've spoken to have mentioned taking payment by paypal, but someone mentioned it may be a front for a cheque scam? Not sure.

It's kinda annoying that on DA there's no way to report a user in general, DA's standpoint is that if art has been stolen, it's up to the artist to report it, and that's fair enough as per the terms of the DMCA. BUT, when someone is soliciting for commissions using stolen art, it's clearly a scam or at least a misrepresentation, and THAT is what I'm trying to report.

Good on you for spreading the word.

It is TOTALLY organized. I looked into some accounts on facebook and it turns out most were repurposed from nigerian romance scams. This is the same kind of people who would try to catfish and prey on folk for money - Just they've realized furries are a good target, and it's depressing seeing it become so common now.

I also see them often posting vouches and referring each other on commission posts. It's clearly just all the same people or just a ring of folk trying to look more legit, ugh

One I've had tried on me is if I win a bid on something, or even just bid at all, you get DMs from people saying they want to draw similar art for you.

Definitely seen a huge uptick in people impersonating existing artists on other places and messengers too.

Yes, and pretending to be the artist who you really bid on under a different acc hoping you won't notice and just send them payment instead! I've seen that one a few times. Lately there was some AI gen fursuit pics being used on places like dealersden to try sell fake suits which was scary too 😥

AI generated fursuits for a big payout wow that's really dark. I've seen how realistic those have been getting too, it's crazy.

I've noticed this too and one even directly contacted me. They didn't seem to get it that I wouldn't trust someone whose samples all look like they're done by different artists, has nothing in their gallery that they drew and that "PayPal payments can be refunded".

There's a couple I noticed in the Furc discord and telegram sadly. The fact they're actually joining specific groups for local meets/cons and not just those generic 'Furry hangout' servers with 10000s of people worries me.

Seen this a lot on a few discord servers i'm on. fortunately they don't last long especially since i get unsolicited messages.

I've had a few on disc too, and noticed our mutual servers are always furry con specific. They're definitely trying to weasel in the community pretty deep if they're even researching on cons.

I’ve had scammers ping me privately on dA claiming to like my gallery and that they’d like to use my work for ‘inspiration’ for a piece they claim to be doing for another user, that I’d be getting paid and credits. At least three using those exact words, plus a couple others with variations thereof.

Usually I just block these pillocks, but your warning here tempts me to take the fight to them, Elliot Ness-style.

I've seen similar too, where people claim to want to buy your art as NFT or something. I've never seen what happens if you say yes, but I'm assuming it's a usual fake PayPal invoice kind of scam . Yucky! I'm glad you didn't go with it. I just saw someone else on Facebook earlier who fell for one and paid $100 for a very obviously stolen wolf fursona picture that just was mirror flipped and edited. :(

I get these in DA notes all the time usually its along the lines of “Hey I like your gallery can I use an image for a mural Im working on? You will be paid for it.” And the profiles are ALWAYS blank DX