I’ve just been hit by the worst case of art theft in my life. My fan illustration, The Great Wave off Kanto, is being sold on phone cases through some of the shadiest websites I’ve ever seen, and there’s nothing I can do to contact them.

Most of these sites have contact pages, but their emails bounce, their phone numbers are fake, and the American addresses they list show empty farms and fields on google maps. The location listed on the contact page for shadeyou.com says their store address is on the corner of a California farm. Another one, lovedrstyle.com seems to be run out of an abandoned warehouse in Illinois. These sellers are likely somewhere in Asia and are trying to cover their tracks.

I’m not the only small artist these anonymous websites are stealing from either.

I feel powerless. This post is an attempt to warn people away from these sites and demonstrate what some of the knockoffs look like. These kind of anonymous sellers can’t be stopped, so it’s up to us to know what to look for when buying a product from a small artist. I know most people buying this particular design won’t realize that it comes from a small artist, but it doesn’t seem like there is much else I can do.

Here are all the websites to avoid purchasing my art from, as of this post:

So far I’ve had success in removing the cases from several sites, (amazon, ioffer, a few knockoff pillow cases from aliexpress) but most of the others have ignored my emails and calls or made it impossible to get in touch, so I cannot send them a cease and desist.

Please keep in mind, if a product by a small artist isn’t coming from their personal store, (Storenvy, Etsy) or service that prints art on products while crediting the artist, (Redbubble, Society6) then you’re running the risk of purchasing a knockoff, and the artist who made it sees no support. If you see someplace selling The Great Wave off Kanto and it’s NOT from my Redubble, Storenvy, Society6, or INPRNT - it’s not me!!

All my sales go directly towards paying for rent and groceries every month, and it’s the same for many other artists. Please be careful where you buy art from!

“Old people believe all that bullshit Fake News on their facebook home,” say I, a tumblr youth™, as I reblog an indignant social justice-flavoured post from mic dot com without fact checking. 

BTW, mic dot com has multiple tumblrs and some of them are as follows:

And if you aren’t already aware, they are a shit company that uses its indignant social justice-flavored posts for clicks even as they do things like fire their four-months-pregnant Connections editor the week after her wedding, without warning. AFTER RUNNING A STORY ABOUT HOW THE USA NEEDS BETTER MATERNITY LEAVE/PROTECTIONS.

This, after they DID NOT fire the guy who lied about a death in his family so he could go build a treehouse and blog about it.

Also 99% of their ~top notch news~ is Huffington Post-style aggregation and NOT original reporting.

SO. Side-eye anything and everything you see by them, because there’s a good chance it’s just clickbait.

They also steal from Black Tumblr and Black Twitter to make their ‘articles’ or whatever.

Those cases, which together used $258,000 from Trump’s charity, were among four newly documented expenditures in which Trump may have violated laws against “self-dealing” — which prohibit nonprofit leaders from using charity money to benefit themselves or their businesses

Add this to the giant list of illegal, unethical, and otherwise con man bullshit this motherfucker has pulled.

It gets better: he was being sued because he rigged a golf contest. He was offering a million dollars to anyone who could hit a hole in one, and a guy actually did it. But then they said it had to be over 150 yards.

For obvious reasons, I’m fucking pissed about this.

I am so disgusted by this…like wtf is this bs

This is what cultural appropriation looks like. It’s not only that they steal our culture. They then bastardize it and make it so only on them it is seen as good enough. Like WTF?!

Shots fired.

Wow, never even thought of this. This is awful…If anyone knows the blogs mentioned above, let’s expose the hell out of them! I swear a Black girl would have got arrested or/and beat up for this. Why should White girls get away with it? Why can only Black women be associated with shoplifting? Because white privilege is alive and well in this country…

#StopWhitePrivilege

I was just talking to my sister about this yesterday…

This seems just like a wonderful way to get them arrested!

UPDATE

Thanks to some wonderful people that have messaged me in the past few days, we now know some of the blogs that post their shoplifting experiences and tips for “beginners”. 

Let’s expose the hell outta them.

Y'all fucking with people’s jobs and their lives.

this is why im so sus of people on Poshmark, wallapop, etc

white people are allowed to showcase their thievery to the public w/o worrying. that’s how privilege works.

Imma start doing shit like this. 

SHAWN WASABI HAS HAD HIS MIDI FIGHTER + MACBOOK STOLEN IN SAN FRANCISCO

Shawn Wasabi, someone I am very privileged to call my friend, has been tweeting tonight that his car got broken into and his one-of-a-kind Midi Fighter 64 was stolen from it, along with his macbook and backup harddrive. The Midi Fighter is this cool launchpad he plays.

The police are refusing to do anything about it, because his eyes were red (from crying) and they decided he and his friends had been smoking. They won’t even let him file a report.

Please, please keep your eyes peeled for his Midi Fighter. It is the only one of its kind in the world. That Midi is his entire musical life and he’s devastated that it got stolen. If you know or see ANYTHING, PLEASE contact the San Francisco police.

I’m so angry. He is a wonderful person and did not deserve this.

PLEASE REBLOG THIS

IF YOURE IN SF OR/AND HAVE ANY INFO

[email protected]

Please signal boost this

PLEASE SAN FRAN FOLKS PLEASE KEEP A EYE OUT FOR MY FRIEND SHAWN

squad goals

Adryan: Taurus, Cancer, Virgo, Libra Derek: Gemini, Scorpio, Capricorn, Pisces Kyle: Aquarius, Leo, Sagittarius, Aries

ain’t this a gentrified version of a hood joke

http://imgur.com/gallery/b9tgc

OH MY GOD?

white people’s thieving ways knows no bounds. this plagiarized mess ain’t even funny and the tone is hella forced lol you can tell it ain’t authentic.

You’re mad dumb Adryan

“Came in clutch”

Copyrighted memes is the future

Cant have shit

Holy shit.

my favorite part of this article:

so tumblr user blossomq made this post

asking for help for their trans friend who lives in manchester, so i saw the gofundme page and was going to reblog it but the picture (which has literally just now been changed from the one pictured above) was quite bad quality so i did a quick reverse image search just in case and found this 

and it basically says that this picture is of a 15 year old from portugal (i couldn’t find the image on the page as it probably has since been deleted) its obvious that the image on the page was a cropped version of this photo so i sent blossomq a message asking what it was all about and instead of responding they deleted all reblogs and the original post from their blog and changed the picture on the gofundme page

https://www.gofundme.com/ck5ecqw4

i’m still not 100% sure what is going on but it’s a little worrying and i’m concerned it might be fake? if theres a good reason for this then i’m open to a response @blossomq so feel free to answer

SO!!! i found the original person’s blog who posted the selfie they first used http://the-troyler-blog.tumblr.com/post/119117630710/heeey-so-my-name-is-laura-im-15-and-from and the current image they are using is also stolen from here http://genderqrvanity.livejournal.com/11708.html

this is gettin more and more suspicious but tbh if you really have made a fake gofundme to get money off of people then i hope you know what you did is awful @blossomq

Omg please please reblog and block the user that is me!! And I’m not trans or asking for donations, please do not donate! Thank you for telling me :)

and because tumblr doesn’t block posts made by people you block (how does that make any sense????), i strongly advise getting new xkit’s blacklist function or tumblr saviour to block any posts made by harmful users. for added protection on tumblr mobile, there’s also an app for that.

why cultural appropriation is harmful:

Do the people who get off to harassing shoplifters on tumblr not realise that there is literally a white supremacist community on here? Seriously, which is worse?

Well first, it’s completely possible to be against supremacy blogs and thieves, and second, at this point you children are definitely causing more problems for the average worker than the supremacy blogs.

seriously that comes out of the worker’s paychecks–not the company–you ignorant klepto fucks. how you think you’re any better when you’re stealing from the pockets of the poor hm??????

I been said these rich hoes is on here leeching from every creative mind and if you have the forethought to plan a cute outfit out and post it on here and it gets popular believe someone’s stylist has seen it and refined it with expensive versions of your pieces for their client. even thought processes get stolen. I know a lot of people on here that like to think out loud and have genuinely interesting and unique opinions, senses of humour and tastes that get stolen by news outlets and paid bloggers. people have all this money and power and choose to just take and take and take from people who have nothing and are using this blogging platform as a form of release and self-expression. go away

i remember i worked at burger king a few years ago and somehow -probably from someone who worked there - $3000 got stolen out of the register. two managers on duty. you think corporate said no big deal and covered it, no both the managers had to split $1500 out of their paychecks. corporations dont give a fuck what happens at the store they just want their money. go steal some shitty makeup from walmart but just know you’re not taking the money from sam waltons 700 grandkids, you’re taking it from whoever was on duty when you walked out the door

edit: my bad i wrote this late at night, i meant bank deposit envelopes not the register. we werent allowed to keep more than a couple hundred in the register at a time, but every few days all the money would go from the safe to deposit envelopes to the bank and it got stolen sometime then. second, this post isnt meant to shame homeless/starving/low income people who need to steal food or necessities to get by, i think that’s a situation where it’s acceptable. this post was written in response to the shoplifting fandom who steal things, revel in it, and post pictures to tumblr