If you’re a photographer selling your services or your work, either full-time or even as a side hustle, there’s an active scam going around right now that you definitely need to be aware of. The good news is that it’s easy to protect yourself against it if you know how it works.

Imagine Your Excitement…

Imagine your excitement when you get an email asking if you’re available on a certain date to photograph a wedding or an event. The initial email may be somewhat scant on details if they just want to check your availability, or it might contain a lot of enticing information about the event itself, possibly including something about wanting to purchase prints and photo books from you afterward. Either way, once they send you all the details, it’s going to sound like a pretty sweet gig that offers a similarly sweet payday for you as the photographer.

On the surface, at least…

This actually happened to me recently, and—spoiler alert—I was fortunately able to avoid being scammed out of any money because I recognized what was going on in time to prevent it. However, I was not as careful as I normally am when responding to new clients—I dropped my guard somewhat and let it go too far before I stopped it. I’m going to tell you how this scam works, how to recognize and avoid it, and what I did wrong when I failed to trust my gut, which was already telling me that something was fishy.

Here’s How the Scam Works

The scammer, posing as a prospective client for your photography business, inquires about your availability, emails you their requirements for your services for an event that is going to happen soon, and you settle on a price with them. When you ask for the deposit (I usually charge 50% upfront to schedule a photoshoot like a wedding or an event), they will tell you that they only handle transactions with checks. If you agree to this condition, they will then send you a check for either the deposit or even the full amount. You deposit the check in your bank, and it seems to clear within a day or two, with the funds appearing as available in your account.

They may then ask you to confirm that you received the payment, and this is in preparation for what comes next.

Very soon after the payment has cleared at your bank, the scammer will send you an email saying something like, “Our available budget has been reduced,” or if the payment also included certain upfront costs like rental charges or materials, they might say something like, “Instead of having you pay for these items, we are going to take care of these charges ourselves from our end.”

Whatever the excuse, the basic message from the scammer is that the gig is still on, but they need you to refund part of the payment they sent because of some changes on their end.

At this point, you probably figure that since the gig is still on and you already have a big chunk of their money, it’s no problem to refund them a part of it—especially if they’re still dangling that juicy (albeit somewhat reduced) payday in front of you. Right?

Wrong.

What Happens If You Go Along With the Scam

If you go along with this scam, here’s what happens next: You send them a refund from your own account, and then you never hear from them again. Worse still, when you check your bank account afterward, you will see that their initial payment has mysteriously evaporated, and you are now out the value of that “refund” you sent them.

This scam is a larger-scale version of the old “money in an envelope” scam, in which the scammer seems to give you a bunch of money in an envelope as payment for something, but they tell you that it’s a few dollars short and ask you for, say, $20 that they will go and change while you hold the envelope with the rest of the money. The scammer disappears with your $20, and you end up holding an empty envelope that they had convinced you was full of money.

The way this works with the bank check version is that banks will often clear checks and make the funds available to you before those funds have actually been collected from the payee’s bank. When the funds at the payee’s bank fail to materialize, your bank cancels the check transaction, and the “cleared” funds that you received as payment disappear from your account.

Armed with this information about how this scam works, this gives us the first red flag to look out for when these scammers approach you.

Red Flag #1: The Prospective Client Says They Only Handle Transactions With Checks

In my case, I got all the way to the point where I had deposited their check, confirmed the payment with them, and then received the email reassuring me that the gig was still on but asking me for a partial refund. When I saw the email, I wanted to slap myself in the face for being such a knucklehead and letting my guard down. There were red flags aplenty along the way to this moment, so why was I so much less careful than I normally am when dealing with prospective new clients?

No excuses here—this is entirely on me because I was not as careful as I needed to be. The scammers emailed me while I was away, and I dashed off a hurried response to them because it sounded like a good gig. I did not have access to my main computer, and our initial email exchange was via my phone.

Red Flag #2: It’s Hard to Verify the Client’s Identity Online

What I would normally have done right away if I had been at my desk at home is send them my new client form, which requires their contact details, including addresses and phone numbers. This is not a foolproof way to sniff out scammers, but anybody who balks at sharing these details should be regarded with suspicion. When I do my due diligence on new clients, I use this information to verify their identities as far as possible. I also like to talk to them on the phone beforehand. Sure, scammers can get burner phones with temporary numbers and use fake addresses, but it’s a lot more trouble to go to, and it’s probably not worth their while for the amount of money they stand to make from you.

Needless to say, because I was away and responded in a hurry, I skipped this process and learned the hard way that there was a very good reason I started doing it in the first place.

I will typically look the client up using social media and other sources as a quick and dirty form of identity verification. If a professional person, for example, does not have any presence whatsoever online at sites like LinkedIn, that’s a red flag. In this recent case, I could not figure out who this prospective client was from any online sources, and since I had no phone number for them, I could not talk to them directly. This gave me pause, and I should have insisted that they share more contact details with me before proceeding. My mistake.

Red Flag #3: The Client Seems Unconcerned With Budget and Adds Extra Services

My prospective client never once pushed back on costs and added extras like prints and photo books to the proposal while we were negotiating. It makes sense, of course, if you think about how the scam works. The bigger their initial payment to you, the bigger a “refund” they can demand when they tell you that “things have changed” on their end. And this brings me to red flag number four.

Red Flag #4: They Send You an Initial Payment Larger Than What You Asked For

In my case, I asked for a 50% deposit, but they insisted on sending me the entire amount upfront. Of course they would—bigger initial payment = bigger “refund”!

In my recent interaction with the scammers, I refused to send them the refund and went to my bank instead to let them know what had happened. They confirmed that the check I had deposited into my account via mobile deposit using my phone was a fake (some of the security features on the check did not pass the sniff test). They put a hold on the payment so that the money no longer appeared as available funds in my account and logged it as a financial scam with their fraud department.

At the end of the day, I was very fortunate that, despite letting down my guard and behaving like a knucklehead, all I lost was some time in the email thread with the scammers and at my bank. All I needed to do to avoid this hassle was refuse to take a check—something I will always do from now on! This could have turned out a lot worse for me, but I’m sharing this with you all in the hope that my cautionary tale might help prevent one of you from being taken in by this scam.