Instagram Scams & Painting, Sold

This past Saturday while I was volunteering I got a DM on Instagram.

It was the guy I put in the fountain in the Lincoln Center painting.

He's an actor/model and has over 11k followers.

So this DM was:

---from an established account I know personally to be a real person who I have met and we follow each other.....

---they said they were doing a giveaway, I asked questions about it (fine print, why, etc), they said send your paypal email... that is not (very) private info so I did....

---AND THEN.... they sent screenshots of a payment,  said they just sent a link, send them that link for verification... THAT'S NOT HOW PAYPAL WORKS and I know that....

---that link was a password recovery link sent *to my phone from the official instagram password recovery system*...

(this person does not have my phone number and it really came from the official Instagram system as it was the same text thread from previous password resets...online searches on this scam verify this as well.)

---They wanted me to share that link with them so they could take over my account. I did not, thankfully. And they PUSHED when I said no.

---I'm pretty good about spotting scams, I consider myself to be a very internet-savvy person, I even have to take yearly certification on this stuff at work, and that one *ALMOST* seriously got me, it got me enough to send my paypal email. It was scary.

---AND that person who was scamming me was almost 100% NOT the actual account owner. His account probably got taken over exactly how this person was trying to take my account over, and he has a ton of followers, 11k, very valuable to a scammer.

If you google Instagram scams (yes it also applies to Facebook, it's all the same Meta company) scammers are using bots to personally DM people with details of things only their friend would actually know, then they scam them.

--I get art scams on Instagram now and then, sometimes through email too but I know them immediately.  These DM scams are new on Instagram.  I read there has been a 50% increase in this stuff over the last year.

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WHY DO THESE THINGS WORK (or almost work) FOR PEOPLE WHO KNOW BETTER?

I was talking to another parent at the time it was happening and showing it to her.

We both thought it was weird but curious.

My vulnerability on it was it came from a person I know to be a real person with a high-profile account who I truly do not think would be scamming people like this. And looking at his account I saw he hasn't posted since September, and he previously posted frequently.

Another parent almost fell for a similar thing and we were talking about WHY... why do people who KNOW BETTER and are reasonably intelligent even consider it?

The answer which applied to both of us was split attention span and stress.

It is scary to realize when we are multi-tasking, stressed, overwhelmed--- we are not thinking as clearly as we think we are. In her case, the scammer put her into a stressful mental state (about her son's phone being lost) and it took her a minute to figure it out and regain her senses.  And like me, she was in the middle of talking care of things and was stressed.

Be careful out there.

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In better news, I sold another painting, the one Sid and I did together of Gapstow Bridge.

This sale helps tremendously and while I have only loosely added numbers in my head, I have definitely covered all my art expenses for the year.  This year I have sold 5 paintings and 1 print.

The next painting I sell will buy a new pair of really good sub-zero boots.

And I do still need to get prints in order, I came a long way with that this year, I guess next year is part 2.

And can you believe I never did anything with the FASO trial year...... nothing.
I haven't had the mental bandwidth to do it.  There is still time, I just feel so incredibly mentally strained I haven't been able to face it.