A few weeks ago I got a contact form submission for a logo design job. Custom auto business, needed a full brand package, budget in the $1000-1500 range. Normal enough. I quoted the project, sent concepts, and the “client” picked two favorites. I sent an invoice for the deposit.
Then something felt off.
The request that gave it away
After sending the invoice, the client wrote back asking for my full address, city, state, and zip code. All of that was already sitting right there on the invoice I’d just sent. A real client reads the invoice. They don’t re-ask for information that’s already in front of them.
That one email made me go back through the whole thread. Once I looked at it as a pattern instead of a series of one-off messages, the red flags were everywhere.
The red flags, in order
Phone avoidance from day one. Early on I offered to hop on a call. The response was “poor network coverage,” with a preference to keep everything in email. That excuse shows up constantly in scam scripts, because a live call is much harder to fake convincingly than a written message.
Boilerplate business copy. The “about us” paragraph read like filler. Vague language about being “established,” about “having branches throughout Michigan,” none of the specific detail a real small business owner drops naturally when they talk about their own company.
A website “under construction.” Not disqualifying on its own, but combined with everything else, one more thing that couldn’t be verified.
An address that didn’t check out. I searched the business address. It turned out to belong to a medical office building, an ABA therapy practice and family medicine clinic. No auto business anywhere near it.
A phone number that belonged to someone else entirely. This is the one that really got me. I searched the phone number listed on the invoice and found it attached to a real person: a township treasurer candidate, filed on an actual county election document. Public campaign filings are exactly that: public. Anyone can pull a name, address, and phone number off one and slap it onto a fake business persona. That’s almost certainly what happened here.
A re-request for information already provided. The move that started this whole investigation.
What I did next
I stopped responding to specific project details and sent a short, direct email explaining I wasn’t moving forward. No deposit had been received, so nothing was owed on either side. I made clear I wouldn’t be sending any files, refunds, or further information.
If a check shows up in the mail, I’m not depositing it. Checks in scams like this often clear temporarily before bouncing days later, by which point a designer may have already sent final files or “refunded” an accidental overpayment. If I ever receive a Zelle payment from this client, since my invoice includes a Zelle QR code, I’ll send the exact amount back to the same account it came from, and document the whole thing with screenshots.
What I’m changing going forward
A verification call before I send concepts, not just before final art. A scammer will happily string along an email thread indefinitely. Fewer will get on a phone call and hold up under basic, direct questions.
A quick search before I quote anything. Business name, address, phone number. Takes two minutes and would have caught this immediately.
A PO box instead of my home address on invoices for new clients. My invoice already has my legal name, home address, phone number, and Zelle info on it. That’s fine for an established client. For someone I haven’t verified yet, it’s more of my personal information than a stranger needs.
Payment platforms with real protections for new, unverified clients. Zelle and checks stay in place for clients I already know and trust. For new inbound leads, I’m moving toward invoicing through something like Stripe or Square, which gives both sides more recourse if something goes wrong.
A couple more patterns worth knowing
The client scam above isn’t the only version of this I’ve run into. A couple of others are worth flagging, because they show up outside of freelance client work too, including in fake job and recruiting emails.
An email address that’s almost right. I once got an email that looked like it came from someone at a real company. The name matched, the domain matched, everything looked normal at a glance. But when I looked up that company’s actual employee directory, every real address followed the same format: first initial, period, last name. The email I’d received dropped the period. Small difference, easy to miss. I forwarded the message to the real person’s actual verified email, and she confirmed she never sent it. Someone had built a lookalike address close enough to pass a quick glance.
A “certification test” you pay for and get reimbursed later. Another one arrived as a normal-looking email, then redirected to a Google Form asking if I’d be willing to take a paid “VIP certification test,” with the cost reimbursed afterward. That reimbursed-later structure is the whole scam. It’s just a different costume on the same overpayment trick: get the target to pay money upfront, promise the money back, and disappear once the payment’s made.
Both of these are worth checking for the same way as the client scam. Look up the actual employee directory or company format before trusting an email address that looks close enough. And treat “pay now, get reimbursed later” as a hard stop, no matter how official the form or the request looks.
The takeaway
None of these red flags were dramatic on their own. Stacked together, they told a clear story. If something about a new client feels slightly off, even something as small as “why are they asking me this again,” it’s worth pausing and looking at the whole thread as a pattern instead of explaining away each piece individually.
Freelancers are a good target for this stuff because we’re used to remote clients, unusual requests, and clients we’ve never met in person. A little friction up front, a call, a search, a payment platform with actual protections, costs almost nothing and saves a lot of potential headache later.
