Another week of freelance photography, another scam runs through my inbox.
This time, a person named Joshua Espinoza(who upon further googling actually is a name who works at complex) posing to work at Complex emails vaguely inquiring about a shoot. This is fairly a common practice, plenty of real people email with vague questions or requests, so naturally I inquire further. This is where the scam is revealed however, upon close reading the response from Joshua Espinoza his email address changes. There is a long grocery list of requirements and bits of information along with saying payment to me would be $2200. Along with horrible grammatical errors and misspellings this is clearly a scam, and upon simply googling “Joshua Espinosa Scam” plenty of recent results saying the same thing arise. They all had varying numbers and descriptions of the shoot, but the point is, someone claiming to be from a major publication emailing from an outlook account and a slew of grammatical errors is worth checking out and taking time to verify. I hope I can help a few fellow photographers, and please feel free to leave a comment if you have also encountered this “Joshua Espinoza” scam to continue to help the community. NEVER click on the links in these emails, and I would recommend not responding.
