A warning!

   As your marketing gets better, you'll attract more and more people to your art. Not all of them are good people!
   Marketing my art has been a fun, rewarding, painful and frightening experience. So when someone sends me an email telling they'd like to buy one of my paintings, it makes everything worth all the troubles. I read and read, I worked my website, ArtofJohnFrench.com ,then reworked it. I bought Google ads, Facebook ads, and even sent postcards to more affluent zipcodes across America. So when I finally see an email in my website email requesting to buy one of my paintings, my heart squealed.
   Then I opened the email.
   Have you ever gotten one of those emails from the Nigerian Prince, or the Liberian bank president, both of whom want to give YOU millions of dollars for no reason? The email I opened scarcely compared. It looked like it was written by a second grader... no, I take that back. I've seen second graders write better. OK, It looked like it was written by a teenager. It made the Nigerian Prince look like a genius.
   FIRST TIP!! Bad grammar usually means someone is writing you who doesn't know English, and is trying too hard to sound smart.
   Instead of someone wanting to use PayPal to buy one of my $200 paintings, this person wanted to pay twice as much, and stressed NO PAY PAL! Then he wanted to use his own shipper. Sounds great!
   SECOND TIP! If it sounds too good to be true, it likely is.
   THIRD TIP! Pay Pal is safe and easy. If someone wants to avoid it, there's a problem.
   FOURTH TIP! He wanted to use his own shipper. There is the heart of the scam: The scammers use stolen credit cards to pay for your art. They include the shipping in their payment. You pay the 'shipper' with the money the buyer gave you. The shipper is part of the scam. Your art, and someone else's money are gone. Sometimes, instead of a stolen credit card number, you get a bad check.
    Usually, a quick Google search will yield mountains of trashy results. Search the email address, or the sender's supposed name, or even a line or two from the email message. You'll be amazed.