My wife is an award-winning artist who, like other creative people, gets targeted with scams on-line from people claiming they want to buy her art. I’ve blogged about one scam they’ve used before.

Here’s how this one works:

They want to buy something from you. You give them the price. It’s usually for a lot of money, because that way, you’re very excited to have sold something for such a huge amount. That makes you more willing to make sure it happens.

Then they send you a message saying they paid. You then get an email that looks like it’s from PayPal (it isn’t) that says your account can’t accept this money because the account needs to be updated to a business account. “Once updated, the money will be available to you. Please deposit $500 into your account to activate the business account.”

You contact the person and they say, “OK, I’ll pay to update the account and then when you get confirmation that it has been approved and my payment has gone through, you can refund that money to me.” (Or, alternatively, you are provided with a link to PayPal so you can make the payment yourself, but of course, the link is a fake one that doesn’t go to PayPal.)

If you do this, you’ll get another fake email saying the account is active and the payment went through. You’re then asked to refund the $500 to the person, who also gets your credit card and banking information that they can use to hack into your account later. See how it works?

Heidi and I do have fun taunting the scammers though before finally calling them out and blocking them. Heidi then publicly posts the scammer’s name and email on her Instagram page to warn others.

Remember: the internet is full of scammers. Always be wary.