Reposted from Peter and Company
PHISHING WARNING: AVOID WALLPART AT ALL COSTS
Over the past 24 hours I have been notified by several people about pages of Peter & Company and other pieces of my artwork being supposedly “available for sale” through a site called Wallpart (which I will not link in this post, for reasons explained below), and in the same time span I have seen many other artists make journals/submissions/posts talking about finding their own work on there as well. Naturally, the inclination of any artist finding their work available for sale without their consent is to head to the “Report Violation” link attached to every listing and file a complaint to have it removed.
PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT FILL OUT THE VIOLATION REPORT ON WALLPART’S WEBSITE.
This site already has a bit of a history, and I’ve read several posts from people who dove into their site code and snooped around. Long story short, there are some very devious bait-and-switch tactics going on. Essentially:
- I have not found any confirmation that they are actually selling any of the images/prints that appear on their site. Their “search function” is nothing but scraper software, which essentially just loads up hits from Google Images and displays them within a pre-built “shop” template based on the image’s resolution. This is why every single piece on there has a title that is lifted directly from whatever gallery site (FA/DA/Weasyl) or general website was hosting it. Example: They have my title card from my Kickstarter page for the P&C pilot, with the title lifted straight off the description.
- The dependence on Google Images is also why doing a search for your own name will turn up different results each time, or possibly no results at all, even though the listings still seem to exist if you have a direct URL to them. Their “search” function never actually searches their own listings; it even offers the same real-time suggestions that you’d get from a Google search bar. Confusingly enough, performing the same search multiple times often returns different results at different times throughout the day. I was able to find dozens of P&C pages supposedly for sale by searching my name yesterday, but today none of them show up in search results – even though the direct links to the page forms (which I saved) still exist.
- Their “Report Violation” link is actually a 100% phishing form. If you fill it out, no matter what you put there, you will be sending them a LOT more than you anticipated. This is actually the main purpose for the site’s existence – they completely anticipate artists being upset about their work supposedly being sold, so they developed a system to exploit those who complain.
- Various pieces of malware and other malicious code have been found embedded throughout their pages at different times. This site is just bad news all around.
- The site itself is hosted in Russia, and has already swapped web hosts 4 times in the past few months. The current host is listed as ENOM, and other bloggers/artists have already sent complaints and reports to their contact page, with little luck. It looks like it’s already been branded and caught in the past and is trying to keep itself alive.
- Also, for a site claiming to have “billions of images” available for print, to only have a little over 3,000 “happy customers” should be a pretty big red flag on its own.
So please – DO NOT VISIT THIS SITE. Do not attempt to search for your own artwork in its listings; if your work shows up on Google, it is guaranteed to be on that site. They’re even listing “prints” of web banners and other graphical elements that were never intended for printing. Do not give it page views, and most importantly DO NOT FILL OUT ANY VIOLATION FORMS, EVEN IF THE ARTWORK ON THE PAGE IS YOUR OWN. Instead, there is a Change.org petition asking for the domain to be stripped and brought down.
Please share the word around as much as possible so other artists don’t potentially fall into their trap by thinking that their “Report Violation” page is actually what it claims to be. These people are pure scam artists, plain and simple. Avoid them at all costs.
