The Instagram Art Swamp
Regular readers will know that I’ve been playing with AI art generators for awhile now. In fact one of the newsletters that did the best was when I showed off a bunch of dumb stuff that I managed to get Midjourney to spit out.
Over the weekend I decided that I’d put some of the árt’ up on Instagram because it was starting to get to a place where I felt like I was producing some good stuff and getting it out there wouldn’t hurt. And okay, perhaps I thought maybe I could start a side hustle producing I don’t know, stickers or something. Maybe wall prints.
I put my first piece up and put my phone down. Now my experience of Instagram is that regardless of what I post there are perhaps a like or two and not much else. Guaranteed one of those likes will come from my mother.
Suddenly my one started buzzing off the hook. As a parent, I feared the worst as I picked up the phone but I was greeted by far too many notifications from Instagram.
People had liked the picture. People were DMíng me. People were commenting. I was getting follows. If I had known that Instagram was this easy when putting up stuff like this, I would have been doing it for months.
I’ll admit, it’s been awhile since I have Instagrammed. Like many of the social platforms, I generally take a pretty light touch approach and mostly ignore them.
One comment caught my eye. It was about how the commenter had stumbled across the picture and loved the piece I had put up. Which was nice to hear. She wanted me to DM her. So I did.
What wonderful work it is she said. I thanked her.
Had I considered making an NFT out of it she asked. I hadn’t but minting one would be simple enough.
She’d love to purchase the NFT if I was interested.
And then she offered me 6ETH.
Now, for those that don’t keep an eye on the crypto markets, 6ETH is about $18,000 AUD.
Then she offered to buy 3 pieces of mine for 6ETH each.
Of course, this was a scam.
To give myself some security, I minted the NFTs on OpenSea and told her that if she wanted them she was welcome to buy them on OpenSea or make an offer on there. She promptly said she would do that.
But then ‘oh no!’ there was a problem with the transaction. She asked me if this was my first time selling (turnabout is fair play so of course I answered that it wasn’t). She sent me a screenshot that ‘support’ had sent her stating that I, as the seller, needed to contact them.
As the scam was run on me a few more times, the contours of it became clear. There are a number of gates that you move through with checks at each point.
Do you know how to mint an NFT? If not, the scam accelerates pretty fast. The scammer will ask you to send them your images so they can ‘help’ you mint the NFTs (which means they now have them). For good measure, based on my research, they’ll probably tell you that you are required to pay a fee for them to mint it for you. This will just be money you send to somewhere that you will never understand or see again.
The other variation is that you will be given instructions on how to mint the NFT yourself but it will be on some marketplace which no one has ever heard of (and which I suspect the scammer is part of, so any fees you pay to mint will go straight to them).
Oh, you do know how to mint? Okay, well there’s problems with the transaction when they’ve gone to purchase from the link you sent them. Here is the email from support, you need to get in touch with them ASAP to resolve it. Notice how the email address is a hotmail.com address (seriously, please take notice of that).
Assuming that you demonstrate enough nous that you probably won’t fall for the support email pathway, then you get sent a QR code. You see, as the seller, you need to connect your wallet so that the transaction can be processed (NOTE: this is not how this works at all on a platform like OpenSea).
This is particularly crafty. If you scan the QR code and don’t pay too much attention, it looks incredibly legit. You will be taken to a full on mockup of the OpenSea page for the NFT. Everything looks right. Except the website address which looks like it is pointing to a server in Russia.
Obviously, I don’t know how that pathway plays out because I was hardly about to connect a wallet to it but my guess would be you connect your wallet to the malicious site and they are able to hijack the wallet and empty it of anything you have in there.
Perhaps this should come as little surprise. NFTs and the crypto space are kind of the wild west. Unregulated, not really traceable, and you certainly can’t expect a refund. So it makes sense that scammers would flood the space and play the numbers game in the hope that they get enough small value out of enough people to make it worthwhile.
More frustrating is the grifters and hustlers.
I have my suspicions that its a symptom of a dying platform. All the real money has moved to TikTok but people still hold on to the last dying gasp of Instagram as a cash cow.
All those comments and most of those follows? Its not real engagement. It’s all requests to DM my pieces to a certain account which will then spam me with messages about the promotion packages they have and how many new followers they ‘guarantee’ I will get. My DMs fill up with people asking where I am located (its the internet, why do you care where I am located?). People tell me they love my work before saying that I should let me promote them before saying how much that will cost me.
I’m not sure there are any real people interacting with me. Not in the sense that its AI commenting etc but I’m pretty sure it’s just someone sitting in the developing world running an account to try and farm a living out of promoting people on Instagram.
And then there are the NFTs bros. No offense to the crypto bros I know (who are generally lovely people when not talking about crypto) but I’ve long been sceptical of those that are so entrenched with crypto.
The NFTs bros are relentless. Like all the other grifters, it starts out with praise for your work. A bit of a comment on how long they’ve been in the NFT space. Then the ask whether you want to hear more. Sure, you say. Why can be the harm.
Then you get hit with the pitch. They know all the top NFT investors. They work with some of the biggest NFT artists in the game. They’re in the Telegram channels and WhatsApp groups with all the millionaires that are speculating on crypto and NFTs.
They can share your work with their network, they quietly whisper into your DMs. Of course, there is a cost. Which they will happily negotiate with you if your budget can’t meet their opening price.
From some Detective Googling, it looks like what comes next is you pay a reduced price, then they start harassing you for more money (addons, double the result, all the things). They keep coming for more and more and more, and then after they bleed everything they can from you, they disappear. Of course they haven’t done what they said they were going to. Of course they didn’t net you a sale. That investor they had lined up who was ready to pull the trigger on buying 4 of your NFTs for 2ETH each, never existed.
I’m sure not all the NFT bros are like that but as one of them said to me ‘Quality isn’t what investors are looking for, they’re looking for a name, that’s what they want to spend money on.’ Which is exactly the point - that NFT bro grifter may not have been trying to run a full on scam on you (though what’s the odds they were) but moving NFTs isn’t an easy thing to do either.
So at the end of this bizarre weekend where I have only been left with a crushing empty feeling that the internet plus late stage capitalism freaks me out, I have a ton more followers but they are all promotion accounts. I haven’t sold an NFT.
But then that was never the point.
And my phone will not stop buzzing.