When I started painting again, I did the very natural thing: I created an Instagram account (myerman.art) to share what I was doing, build a following, and embrace a community of global artists.
Within minutes of establishing that account and posting some of my work, I started getting weird comments and private messages from what turned out to be “NFT collectors” — I put the term in quotes because they’re not really collectors at all, but scammers mostly.
At first I tried to ignore them, but then I got more and more interested in the world of NFTs, so I took a course at Domestika.org (a really great place to take art classes, btw), learned how to mint my own, and created various offerings up at OpenSea.
What happened next was another level of scamming, as I was then introduced to all kinds of new grifts, cons, and other approaches to separate me from both my money and my art.
As I’ve spent the last 27 years in high-tech, and about half of that in security, I figured I would create a deck that describes all the scams as a warning to artists. I’ve made that presentation deck available on Google docs for all to look at below. If you’re interested in talking about NFTs and all the scammers in that world, let me know!
