Scammers Use FantasyWire Images

I am Robin Wight and I create the wire fairy sculptures. For the past 2 years scammers have been using my images claiming to be me and claiming to sell my fairy sculptures. 

Its a very complicated problem but I need to make a few things very clear:

I am not going out of business

I have not given anybody permission to use my images to sell fairies

I have not sold my designs to anyone in China

I only make about 10 fairies each year and I sell them all personally. If you think you are buying a fairy sculpture and you are not in direct communication with me personally via fantasywire.co.uk, I guarantee you are being scammed.

When it first started, I spent about two months solid attempting to shut them down and made ZERO progress.

All law enforcement and even the UK government have simply said “outside of our jurisdiction you are on your own”.

There are tens of thousands of scams using my images across every social media and online selling platform. The scammers and every tech company view you as cash cows to be milked. The tech company business model is to use algorithms to get your attentions. They sell your attention to the scammers in the form paid ads or a percentage of the sale. I would estimate that if we could remove fraud from these platforms, their revenue would be cut in half. So the tech companies rely of the scammers to make their billions. They prioritise profit over user safety every time. They do not want to lose the scammers business. They pretend to care and have to provide some means for users to report fraud in order to create they legal defence. But they make reporting fraud as painful as possible and frustrate any attempt to get them involved with any case bigger than a single ad.

In my opinion: Facebook are by far the worst and I would go so far as to say they are the most corrupt immoral company on this planet.

eBay completely ignored me for weeks until the BBC contacted them. They removed ever single ad the same working day proving that it can be done. But as soon as the program aired they insisted that I report and justify my ownership of every single image.

To be fair, at the peak, Amazon were helpful and were removing approx 1000 fake products a week that were using my images.

I am well aware of the scale of the problem. I’m very grateful to everyone who helps me report them. Its the only thing we can do until these companies are regulated.