Something (else) is wrong on the Internet
The weird world of the commission hustle
Hello, Substack!
My name is Sandy; I am a writer, mapmaker and amateur historian. I intend for most of my posts here to be focused on weird history, modern folklore, or etymology. But, sometimes, I want to be able to talk about things that take place entirely in the present. So! Without further ado, let’s talk about scams.
No, wait. Let’s start with some context. Furry fandom, my online home, is dominated by its creative community; generally, though not exclusively, when people talk about “furry” they are likely to have in their head a drawing of some two-legged animal—or someone dressed up as one, but that’s out of scope for us here. Something like my Substack avatar, for instance.
Furry is also dominated by its original characters. You are not required to have some kind of avatar, but nearly everyone does. The intersection of these two things is that the fandom generates a lot of original art, because people are wont to commission art of those avatars. This also made furry fertile ground for early forays into generative AI. To some extent this makes sense, right? Furries like art, and Midjourney et al. are a way of creating images.
But the fandom, by and large, revolted. General-purpose art site FurAffinity banned AI-generated material first—early enough to have received some coverage for doing so. SoFurry (the site on which I am staff, and thereby where this post started, although all opinions are my own) and Inkbunny followed suit last year.
AI-generated content is not permitted in major art shows, and is not allowed in e.g. cover art for works that would otherwise qualify members in the Furry Writers Guild. Individuals still dabble in it, at the risk of becoming pariahs in mainstream spaces, but I would venture to say this is a settled issue:
And then there was Discord.
Since 2023, there has been a constant cadence of new users registering on my site’s Discord server with the aim of selling art to people. The MO is pretty straightforward. They join, message someone, engage in a minimal degree of smalltalk, and then ask: “so, do you have a fursona?” If the mark says “yes,” then they start the pitch: I’m open for commissions, here’s my price list, I’d like to draw your character.
I say “mark,” and I said “scam” at the outset of this essay, but I don’t know if it’s really accurate. As far as I know, you will get some kind of art back. It will be wildly overpriced, and consist of traced line work over an AI-generated image. The “scammer,” for shorthand, is not an artist, not a part of the fandom, and not looking to build a portfolio. They’re looking to flip extremely low-effort work for as much as they can.
If it were just a hustle, it wouldn’t really be in my remit to write about. But there’s something odd about these folks. For one, consider the names: Evelyn Adam, Angela Welch, Roselee Jackson, Stephanie Adams. Furries, by and large, use names that are… weirder. They have puns in them, or they’re just foreign words, or they have something to do with animals (generally, their animal of choice). The… hustlers? Commission charlatans? What do we call them?
The mountebarks—how’s that?—do not.
Almost universally, they have names that are designed to scan as “white western woman.” The name list they’re using is a bit quirky—dated, for one (Dorothy, Clara, Delilah, Hazel, Patricia…)—but recognizable. This, in and of itself, isn’t suspicious. Sandy Cleary is not my real name, either; I’m also not white. But it did pique my interest, particularly when a new user joined not the site Discord but the site’s web-based chat.
This is something that I think bears noting. The mountebarks are “fake,” in some sense, but there are real people behind them. They are not bots. A real person is typing into the Discord window, and having a real conversation with you. They are definitely flexible enough to find new and different channels for the hustle, and they are smart enough for a long con.
But they are also not coming into this blind, or acting purely on their own. We can tell this by looking at their profiles:
Commission slots open! Transform your ideas into digital reality. DM for inquiries. Let's make your visions come alive! 🖌️✨
Crafting bespoke art for fursonas everywhere 🎨 Let's bring your characters to life! #FurryArt #CommissionsOpen 🐾
Colorful fursona creator and enthusiast, spreading love, art, and positivity within the furry community. Commissions open! Let's bring your characters to life
🎨 Streaming STUFF Artist | Turning pixels into real-world gaming treasures | Join my live crafting sessions for the ultimate in-game experience! 🕹️✨
🌟I'm Passionate Furry Artist 🖌️😍 Creating NSFW & SFW Fursonas 🎨 Design Enthusiast & Animator 🔥🎬 COMMISSION OPEN 💖 Let's bring your vision to life! 😍💖
𝓣𝓾𝓻𝓷𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓓𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓶 𝓐𝓻𝓽 𝓲𝓷𝓽𝓸 𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓵𝓲𝓽𝔂 𝓲𝓼 𝓶𝔂 𝓱𝓸𝓫𝓫𝔂! 𝓕𝓾𝓻𝓻𝔂 𝓐𝓻𝓽𝓲𝓼𝓽🐰 | 𝓕𝓻𝓮𝓮𝓵𝓪𝓷𝓬𝓮 𝓐𝓻𝓽𝓲𝓼𝓽 🎨…
ᴘᴀ𝖘𝖘ɪᴏɴᴀᴛᴇ ɢʀᴀᴘʜɪᴄ ᴅᴇ𝖘ɪɢɴᴇʀ & 𝕬𝖓𝖎𝖒𝖆𝖙𝖔𝖗🎨 | ʙʀɪɴɢɪɴɢ ᴄʀᴇᴀᴛɪᴠɪᴛʏ ᴛᴏ ʟɪғᴇ✨ | ʟᴇᴛ'𝖘 ᴍᴀᴋᴇ ᴠɪ𝖘ᴜᴀʟ ᴍᴀɢɪᴄ ᴛᴏɢᴇᴛʜᴇʀ💫 |
𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐀𝐫𝐞 𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐧 🌟 Hi there! I'm a passionate 𝐅𝐔𝐑𝐑𝐘 𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐒𝐓 bringing your wildest characters to life, Join me on this creative journey. 🌍
Step into a world of vibrant imagination with this meticulously crafted masterpiece from a professional furry artist. Let your wildest dreams take shape as you make this unique artwork your very own🤩🎃✨
I would describe this as being in an uncanny valley of an artist profile. Looked at individually, there’s nothing all that unusual. They have a little spice to them—they use a lot of emojis, and Unicode Latin-like glyphs to approximate bold or italic text the way somebody might in their TikTok profile.
Looked at as a body, though, you start to see the cracks. These are computer-generated profiles, probably not even anything as sophisticated as GPT. A Markov chain, perhaps, or just a random generator that fills in a few blanks. Some phrases—“with [each/every] stroke of my digital pen, I…” stands out—are shared verbatim. Others are purely snowclones.
There are hundreds and hundreds of these profiles, across both social media (Twitter, Discord, Tiktok, Instagram…) and art sales platforms (Fiverr, Behance). I do not know how many people are behind them, but I have to imagine there is not a separate individual running each and every one. I don’t know whether this is “organized,” in any meaningful sense—whether there’s one operation where people go to work and sit at a desk and spin these profiles up. I decline to speculate.
But here is where this post splits into two parts. In the first, I want to give you some pointers for finding and removing these accounts, if you’re someone in a position to do so. In the second, I want to record the thoughts that are brought to mind from having stumbled across this rabbit-hole (…if you will) to begin with.
If you are running a community, here are some things to keep in mind. First, a distinct set of patterns in the profile text. Ones I’ve noticed:
“[turn/turning/transform/transforming] your [noun] into [noun]”
“let's bring your [noun] to life”/“let's make your [noun] come alive”
“[adjective] furry artist” (dedicated, passionate, professional)
If they have a profile on TikTok/Twitter, look for sentences punctuated by emojis
Unicode special characters to create bold or stylized text
Second, some patterns of behavior:
Joining a group purely to advertise, and hitting the hard sell early
If your community has DMs, making use of that feature to message as many people as possible without triggering any alarms
Talking in English that is not machine translated but also slightly off—referring to people as “buddy” or “pal” like they were affecting a 50s greaser
Describing themselves as a "traditional artist" and using that tag on identifiably AI-generated material when asked to provide references or talking about their process
Third, some idiosyncrasies in the profile themselves, including ones that are unique to furry fandom:
Using a real name, almost always a name that parses as “white American woman” (Stephanie, Rose, Hazel, Laree, Sophia, Juliane)
Punctuating their username with emoji or writing it in the same kind of Unicode special characters
A recent profile date (after ~June, 2023)
Identifying as a species, with an avatar that is clearly not that species
Provably stolen art as an avatar and banner image, with different artists for each
Misrepresenting their location as (almost always) American
If you can log IPs or ISPs, every one of these names I’ve dealt with, where I can identify a location, has come from Pakistan. Sometimes they are open about this; Damil Hussain, for instance, lists his location as Karachi. Generally they are not.
You may be asking at this point why I am writing this all down, thus making it easier to come up with ways to adapt and circumvent this. For a start, I doubt this is going to get any traction so I’m not too worried about turning people on to this network. But, also, here’s the final part of the post.
As the person responsible for dealing with spam on SoFurry, I’ve known for quite some time that there are real people behind most of them. Computational obstacles—CAPTCHAs, hidden fields that bots automatically fill in but humans do not, etc.—don’t do anything for that. Particularly in parts of the world where labor costs are low, it’s barely even a speed bump. But this, I think, is something else.
Most of the spam we get—indeed, most of the spam all furry sites get—is nonspecific. It’s general, SEO-focused dross about volleyball equipment or web design firms or escort services. Now, though, we’ve entered an era where machine learning has made these kinds of operations easier in a new way: serving as a force multiplier that drives down the cost of tailoring the hustle—spearphishing, at scale.
It is easy to create a dozen new profiles that look almost furry, and furry is susceptible to this because the bespoke art culture was already ingrained and easy to take advantage of. But it will be just as easy to find the right inroad into other fandoms—to be not a mountebark but a slate of sewing-obsessed moms with patterns to sell, or novice artists looking to build their Unity portfolio and eager to work on your game.
The individuals and groups behind these accounts will adapt. There are other patterns I am already becoming suspicious of and tracking—subtler patterns, which I am keeping closer for now. It is not a matter of this specific network; this specific (if large) cluster of accounts 👩💻Turning Your 🎇Dreams Into Custom Art🖌️.
It is a matter of how, as community stewards, we educate and protect those communities. We have warned people on Discord repeatedly, and yet they keep getting taken. You are not smarter than that. I am not smarter than that. But this post ends on a question mark, because I do not know what the next steps are.
If you were not aware of these patterns, now you know what to look for—for now. We cannot prevent the next generation of this hustle from emerging, we can only mitigate its impact. That mitigation will not be technological. Computers will not save us from the problem computers have created.
So what will?