just wip it

I have been collecting artworks for over a year now (no not the art-mona-lisa-paintings you are thinking of right now) and I pay Pet Society items for art commissions or game cards but most of these items are paid for with real money, most I paid for an art is $10 (I'm such a cheapskate) but I cannot remember how many $10 artworks I've commissioned so far considering that I have have nearly 400 artworks commissioned as of the moment, the latest one was a bargain because the artist is selling her arts for $40-$50 in FurAffinity which, like DeviantArt hosts artworks (currently I commissioned a $20 piece ^^). There are so many art scams in our fanart community (I have been scammed too T_T) because of two reasons: one, art collectors in our forum are so competitive, we try to outbid each other and when a new artist opens shop we try to get in the limited slots the artist is opening so when the artist demands that the buyer pays first, the buyer, not wanting to lose the slot (later on we brag about it in our galleries - jk) would often pay first; two is that since most buyers want digital arts, it's so easy to steal art from an artist and pretend that it's your work and until someone recognizes the work as someone else's art no one would know better, take this case for example:

in her thread she's saying she wants cash shop items for her art, and she's asking how much would buyers pay for her art. Then buyers started offering this and that and the price was going high then someone from the forum sent a note via DeviantArt seeing her art there probably making an offer to her for DA points and found out she's a scammer; here are some comments about it:

Those were actually the mellow comments, and it took a while before she was exposed as a scammer, and again this is another lesson that the internet is full of scammers and we must be very careful with our online dealings. Well one of the suggestions of artists is to ask for wips or work in progress from the seller-artist but since we're all buying digital arts, during one of the community's discussion, it was said that even wips can be forged by copying the image, locking it down and tracing the layer, not sure what those entail but it can be done. We currently have our resident artists, those who stay a long while in the forums and most of them do livestreaming, meaning you can see them draw your art for you (I always think of those chefs cooking your food in front of you) so as to them we normally don't ask for wips anymore, if you are unsure you can ask for a pencil sketch then lineart then coloring in process, here's an example:

actually the case of Anabelle is more of an identity theft to be able to perpetrate an online scam, which is why being careful about buying art is important because you have no recourse to any remedy, Playfish will not intervene and give you your items (which is basically your money) back and since most of these are less than $20 I don't think it's worth it to go to file a report etc and have it investigated because the costs would outweigh the benefits