If you are an artist who sells your work, or anything else online... please beware of a scam that someone tried to pull on me. Also, please spread this on to as many artists or people who sell online as you can.

Here is the scam:

- the person contacting you to purchase your work is from another country
- the person has very poor English
- when you confirm the total of the order and shipping costs, they will say that it is cheaper for them to have a shipping agent pick up the order from you.
- they will then say that they owe the shipping agent some money for other items that they are picking up (they told me $300). They ask you if you would please pay the shipping agent for them, as the shipping agent requires the payment to be done through Western Union and they don't have Western Union in their country. Oh, and they so generously offer you an extra $100 for your time.
- they will then give you 2 credit card numbers because the limits are not high enough on them for the whole order. I'm presuming that this is actually because those amounts aren't high enough to alert the credit card companies.

At this point I knew it had to be a scam, so I googled "Western Union Shipping Scam" and sure enough it led me to this website: [link] I was fortunate (and smart enough) to not fall for the scam, but they were quite convincing for a while. So again, please pass this on to anybody you know who sells items online!!!