karen cooper -- Blog: the latest scam?

Watch Your Email...

by Cooper on 3/15/2010 2:04:15 PMComment on this

Greetings,

Welcome to the Cooper studio, Jefferson, Iowa. I've had an interesting experience that I'd like to draw your attention to.

Just recently, we were all treated to the great article, Artists Online Presence - How One Artist Does It (Moshe Mikanovsky) so informative and helpful, that we were all pumped to get our work out there even more. And I will continue to keep at it, even after the events of this morning.

Let me explain. This morning, I discovered I had an online presence of a sort I didn't want, didn't like, and most importantly didn't authorize.

Here's what you might want to watch out for. I received an email stating my account for the online gallery was reviewed and ready, gave me an account number, told me to approve or make changes by sending to the email listed.

As mentioned in Mikanovsky's article, there are a ton of online galleries at which to show your work. My first thought was that this was one I'd signed up for and then forgotten about. After a lot of hunting and pecking, I finally found my way to their sign up page, and one quick glance told me I'd never seen it before. That meant somehow they had all my info and one of my paintings, without ever talking to me.

Fine, I thought, I'll find out how to log in and just delete the silly thing. Wrong. I had been magically signed up as a display artist. Display artists are not allowed to login and make changes to their accounts---that could only be done by an account manager. They assured me this was done to keep poor quality images off the sight. To be able to edit my own account, I had to be a virtual gallery artist. They'd be ever so happy to upgrade my status. I'm sure. A very brief pointed email to the account manager, and my "display artist" page has since been removed.

Ironically, there was some interesting art at the site. I wondered how much of it was really submitted by artists, and how much of it was "borrowed", like mine. Hey, they might even be a successful art marketing venue for some people. But I'm here to tell you, definitely not for me.

Ok. Back to happy things, like painting :)

Later, Cooper

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