Fanfiction Art Commission Scammers: Baited

I'm a writer. I've written fanfiction. And the fanfiction I write sometimes gets comments! It's the best feeling ever, when you get an email from somewhere like Archive of Our Own, saying "a new comment has been left on your work!"

Yes! Some feedback! That doesn't happen a lot--I wonder what they had to say!

Incredible work! The atmosphere here is so thick and the emotions feel so raw. I could actually picture the pauses and every small expression perfectlyy. Do scenes playy visually in your head when you write, or is it more about emotion for you? I’d love to discuss some creative ideas for these scenes please check my bio for my work. Discord: angeladraws10 | Instagram: selira_vale01 If you are interested so check my bio for further discussion!

sigh

If you're a fic writer (and let's be honest, if you're reading this post, you probably are), you've likely received one of these comments. This was left on Time Warp, a fic I haven't completed, but according to my AO3 data, appears to be the most popular of my works. It doesn't tend to get a lot of comments, but I get emails every few weeks about kudos. So, when scam artists make their way into my comments section, I inevitably get excited! Only to suffer the crash of "oh, nevermind."

Well, unfortunately for this scammer, I have oodles of time for the next couple of weeks. So, against the advice of everyone on the internet,

I reached out to a comic artist scammer who commented on a fic so you don't have to.

Here's what happened.

Some context: this occurred at midnight during a day considered catastrophic fire danger here in Victoria. So while I was speaking with this yahoo, please imagine lightning flashes every minute occurring out the window with wind smashing trees against fences.

I looked up selira_vale01 on Instagram and found just two images, not very representative of a portfolio.

Figuring I'm better on my home turf of Discord, I added angeladraws10. The response was immediate--they accepted and messaged me within minutes.

• Angela: wave emoji
• Angela: Hey
• Angela: How are you?
• Me: Hi! You liked my fic! Thanks very much!
• Angela: Your welcome!

Figuring I'd like to see if they recognized my handle, I started immediately asking if they liked Time Warp.

• Me: What stood out to you?
• Angela: So are you interested in amending your story into comic
• Me: I'd like to hear more about your thoughts on my fic before we talk about that
• Me: Is there a particular character you would prefer to POV from in a comic?
• Me: There are three protagonists, of course!

The way Time Warp works is that every chapter has a different POV switch, between Poe Dameron, Cassian Andor, and the Mandalorian.

That Angela had immediately gone straight into asking about a comic, was automatically a suspicious red flag. But the English major in me was caught on the word "amending."

This seemed strange and could be indicative of two things:

Angela was translating and "amending" was what came up instead of "making" or "adapting."

The least likely, they intend to try and have me delete the story in favour of their comic.

I find the second option extremely unlikely, given that the scam is an attempt to get money from you. I also didn't really think to clarify this when I was talking with them.

• Angela: I read your story on Ao3 and when i was reading your story i was thinking that your story has so much potential and it would look amazing in comic that's why i commented on your story and secondly i don't wanna draw a specific character, I wanna amend the whole story into comic
• Angela: So tell me are you up for it ?
• Me: I get that, but there's three specific perspectives
• Me: It'd be rather tedious to draw the same chapter three times, no?
• Angela: No dear we'll draw 1 chapter at once
• Angela: We don't have to do it twice or thrice
• Me: Hmm.
• Me: Okay.
• Angela: So kindly share the link of your story so that i'll start figuring out the things

This indicates that not only did they not know who I was, but they definitely did not read Time Warp.

If you're going to make art based on a fic, one would expect you know what fic you're referring to, right? Commission artists don't go around willy-nilly to fics blasting their contact info in vague hopes someone will take them on.

Right?

Commission artists, back me up here…?

Of course, I reacted how any fic writer would in this case: hurt.

• Me: ???
• Me: Oh
• Me: I'm sorry
• Me: I assumed you liked it?
• Angela: Np dear
• Me: Normally that means you would have bookmarked it?
• Angela: Yes dear i liked it but i liked and commented on 5-10 stories everyday
• Me: It's Time Warp
• Me: 🙂
• Angela: So kindly share the link of your story or your username of Ao3 account

Out of vindictive curiosity, I handed them Numb Little Bug, a Spider-man fanfic I wrote shortly after No Way Home came out.

The response was interesting.

• Angela: Tysm
• Angela: Dear i commented on Numb little bug. Not this one
• Me: Yeah that's numb little bug
• Me: So do you have some examples of your work?
• Angela: So tell me how many pages of comic do you want ?
• Me: How many do you think it needs?
• Angela: Sure just gimme a sec
• Angela: It's kinda long story so for me it would take 9-10 pages of comic
• Me: Sure. If you could do a basic draft panel to show me how you'd start, that'd be great!
• Angela: Here are some of my recent commissions which i've drawn for my previous clients

I received four images. Two came back with exact match hits from Google Lens.

As you can see, neither appear to be drawn by angeladraws10 or selira_vale01, but also neither DeviantArt profile appears to be available anymore.

• Angela: [...] lemme make it very clear that i'm a commission artist and i charge for my services
• Me: Oh? So you have a price list?
• Me: Can I see your website??
• Angela: Sure
• Angela: https://artistifystudio.com/
• Angela: Here is my webiste

This is where the real rabbit hole begins.

First of all, holy AI, Batman! While it's plausible some work here may not be AI, but each comic and manga has that type of style I associate with GPT. According to artistifystudio, these two pages are made by the same artist:

This is a game of spot the difference. First of all, headshape between the two has drastically changed, as well as the composition of each character's nose. Hermione (I presume that's Hermione in the second image's third panel?) suddenly changes hair? The clothing style also changes significantly.

How do I know they're the same artist?

They included one of them in their examples to me.

So now we can assume that yes, this person is claiming to be the artist of at least this image.

Unfortunately, after my snooping last night, they appear to have caught on to me being incredibly suspicious by the names and have just gone out of their way to number themselves. Ergo, the artist is merely referred to now as:

Unfortunately, I didn't screencap this page on my phone last night, but that's okay, because I did screencap a more significant ID later on. At the time, they had artist names listed above art examples, so having scanned through the site, I pointed out my issue:

• Pixel: I'm confused
• Pixel: You're not listed as one of the artists on the website
• Angela: Dear i changed my username few weeks ago because there were alot of people using my name and scamming people
• Angela: That's why i change my name
• Pixel: What did you last work on?
• Angela: Wdym by that ?
• Pixel: Your last project
• Pixel: Can I see it?
• Angela: my last project was a book cover
• Angela: Which i've drawn for a client
• Angela: lemme show you

They send this:

This does not meet the typical dimensions of a book cover--comic, written, etc. It doesn't even meet the requirements of a thumbnail for a Wattpad or FFN cover.

But this image. This fucking image. Leads me down. The longest motherfucking rabbithole I have ever been in.

First of all, this thing shows up a bunch on the website, under an artist who has a different name entirely:

Doing a search, we find that juliasimon77 was on FFN. They're on AO3. They have no bookmarks or works to speak of. Same with FictionPress and VGen. They're on RoyalRoad (which I'd never heard of until now), again with no content to speak of (but 36 comments--I wonder what they are!) They're also on Webnovel doing--wouldn't you guess it--the same damn thing that Angela is doing.

Okay, well clearly there may be a case of mistaken identity--what if I reverse search the image they gave me?

Excellent! They have a DeviantArt profile, and I can finally look at some of their other work... which, reverse image searching all their stuff shows that, you guessed it:

It's all stolen.