Hello everyone, thank you for taking a minute to read this and keep yourself and your community informed. Just a quick timeout from the usual creative talk and after a week of biting my tongue, I've found myself sitting to share something bothering me a lot lately.
If you spend any time on Instagram, Facebook, or Pinterest, you have probably seen those slick, crochet ads pop up in your feed. Lately, there is a big specific one circulating that features cheap instructions and is written by a specific lady, promising to teach you how to quickly learn to crochet and sell hot crochet items for fast cash, if you follow the link it leads to an infomercial style ad, claiming for just $27, you can learn to crochet all these fabulous items.
Here is how they cover themselves: They don't actually explicitly state, "We are selling you these exact patterns." Instead, they slickly claim they are teaching you the skills, showing you a "catalog" of what is possible, and promising that you too can go from easy to intricate crochet just by clicking below.
But here is the real catch: the gorgeous items flashing across your screen to get you excited are real crochet items, physical patterns, belonging to completely different independent designers. They are using the hard work of real artists as visual bait to sell a generic course.
It looks tempting to some i would imagine, because the items in the photos are genuinely beautiful. But my internal radar immediately went off. When I dug deeper, I found a classic digital product scraping scam.
As a designer, it breaks my heart to see this because these scammers are stealing the collective hard work of independent makers. If you want to keep your wallet safe and support real artists, here is the exact trail of breadcrumbs I followed to crack the case and what you can look out for:
1. The Get Rich Quick Hook
Legitimate crochet teachers want to teach you the craft. Scammers want to sell you a side hustle. If an ad focuses entirely on how cheaply you can buy the book and how fast you can make hot items for easy money, be wary. Making a sustainable living with art is not always the easiest thing, even for skilled professionals.
2. The Ghost Author
If an ad claims a specific person wrote a book, do a quick Google search on them. When I looked up the author of this viral ad, she turned out to be a visual artist with no crochet, working out of a foreign country.
3. The Franken Collection of Patterns
I will warn you, these are all real crochet patterns, that do exist out in the world. When you look at the images of the projects they are promising to teach you, do they look completely mismatched? Do they feature totally different yarn weights, photography styles, and design aesthetics? One person cannot possibly be the mastermind behind fifty completely distinct styles of patterns. These operations use automated bots to scrape images from Etsy, Ravelry, and person blogs, bundle them into a messy Pdf, and sell them as their own.
4. The Disconnected Website Address
Always look at the URL in your browser bar. The site running this specific ad looked like a standard page, but the actual domain pointed to a generic e commerce checkout platform based out of Argentina, which Google flagged as a 'linen factory outlet.' Scammers use these short lived, random subdomains because they can set them up in minutes, take credit cards, and disappear before Meta can shut down their ads.
The Bottom Line
If you buy these 'books', what you usually end up with is a low quality, scrambled pdf filled with low res screenshots or Ai generated givverish that is impossible to actually crochet from.
Let's keep supporting the real deisgners who spend weeks testing, mathing, and perfecting stitch by stitch, their real designs. If a deal looks too good to be true, trust your gut, cause it usually is.
Below is not even a real crochet pattern. Of course, watch for those as well.
Thank you for stopping by and for your support.
Best wishes and happy crocheting,
~ Cathleen π§Ά
