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With Sarah, Phil, Ellen, Rose the dentist, and the granddaughter whose name I forget.

Robert Jones, NAPA

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If you show yourself and your work in ANY public space, online or not, you can expect to receive scam calls and emails.  What concerns me about these emails is that they're coming through the POL message system - but the information provided by the "email the artist" feature on the Gallery is the means by which that happens.  Only if emails had to be routed through the company and deleted before they reach us could this be corrected; I don't know of any site which actually does that, particularly if members can participate in it for nothing - they don't have the resources, the staff, the only thing they could do is remove the feature altogether. I confess that I have not found the email the artist feature of any use - I seem to recall getting an expression of interest through the site, though it was a while ago, and I'm pretty sure no sale eventuated; so the removal of it would not bother me; but it would then be fairly pointless to offer work for sale - and anyway, I don't do that through POL, as a general rule (I may have once or twice, I don't remember). In other words - once you indicate that you're open to making money from your work, horrible little scammers in far-away places will conclude that they might instead make money from you.  If there's a way of stopping them, short of disabling parts of the site, I don't know what it is.  I do know that all approaches from NFT merchants are scams, and that the bulk of them that I've received haven't originated from this site.  This is the world we live in, it's a nest of desperate thieves and liars, and that, frankly, is the reality of the internet.  

Painters-Online Team

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I'd like to assure everyone that I definitely blocked this person's account - twice! Probably shouldn't speak too soon, but they don't seem to have come back again. The reason some people received the mail after the ban is due to a delay on the send/receive on some email clients. The accounts were blocked on Feb 12 and 13.

John Johnston

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Then I'm confused. I looked at this account and "Followed" it on Feb 15th. The accountee followed me back a couple of days later. For my understanding as a forum owner, how is that possible if the accounts are blocked?

Painters-Online Team

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I can't show the email addresses for obvious data protection reasons (scammers or not!) but here is a screengrab showing the accounts which were locked.
Moi 17

Linda Wilson

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I find all this very surprising as my college friend, who lives in Bali, Indonesia cannot acces your site at all.

John Johnston

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I still don't understand why I'm still able to Follow this persons account if it's blocked. Clearly POL has different ways of doing things from other forums so I'll ask no more questions and accept what you're saying. Thank you for taking time to produce the screengrabs. 

Painters-Online Team

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The site does have a block on a handful of countries where, unfortunatley, most of the spam tends to come from. If you know of genuine artists who are missing out on PO though do drop me a mail and I will see what can be done.
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