For a while, I’ve heard about artists and photographers doing a search for their name (and images) on the Wallpart website, which supposedly sells prints. After hearing so many artists and photographers all claiming to have “found” their images on this site, I was figuring that they aren’t spending time scouring the Internet for images to sell, but rather scrubbing the Internet with something like Google Images or their own software to locate and assemble the images in the milliseconds between you hitting the return button and it coming up on your screen.
Turns out I’m slightly wrong. Right about scrubbing to find your work, wrong about selling images. They have no intention of selling any images, they are simply a phishing website, looking to gather information from ticked off artists and photographers. Artists Peter and Company posted a great explanation linked here on their Tumblr account really explaining this scam.
The most important parts of their article are these two headers, quote (in their all caps and bold):
PHISHING WARNING: AVOID WALLPART AT ALL COSTS
PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT FILL OUT THE VIOLATION REPORT ON WALLPART’S WEBSITE.
That sums it up completely in two lines. Please pass this on to your friends.
Jack
#1 by Vivian on July 27, 2015 - 3:42 pm
“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.” ~ Peter & Co.
Thank you for the warning.
#2 by Alex Saunders on August 12, 2015 - 11:30 am
Thanks for sharing.