Gone Phishin’: What Graphic Designers Need to Know About a Weird Internet Scam Targeting Creatives
Do not take the logo-design bait
By Emily Gosling
Most of us have seen phishing emails — maybe a dodgy e-mail address asking about details for a bank you don’t even use, or badly spelled requests to reset a password on an Amazon or Netflix account. They’re nothing new — for as long as the internet has existed, people have found ways to exploit others through it — and they’re usually pretty easy to spot. But until recently, I had no idea that there were scammers specifically dedicated to targeting the graphic design community.
Earlier this year, I got an email from Andy Reynolds, a former graphic designer who now runs his own PR business. Reynolds wrote that while his graphic design site is still up and running, it’s rarely used, so he found it odd to get “not one, but two out-of-the-blue requests” for design work, using very similar language and quoting the same price. The first request was from “Dave powell” [sic] asking him to design a logo. “I didn’t respond immediately as I’m concentrating on my publicity business and was not interested in taking on any design, particularly a logo,” Reynolds told me. Months passed, Reynolds forgot about it, and then he got a similar email from “James Browne.”
