Fake vendor emails impersonate Kansas City's Holiday Swing craft fair

According to KSHB, scammers have built fake vendor recruitment emails using the name, flyers and application forms of the Strawberry Swing Indie Craft Fair's Holiday Swing, a Kansas City area event now in its 16th year.

Katie Mabry van Dieren runs the event. She has found four different emails impersonating her and her fair. One email, signed by a 'Haley Erickson, vendor relations and logistics coordinator', invites a prospective vendor to join the event, then follows up with a request for a vendor fee. Erickson does not work for Mabry van Dieren or the event. The application form attached to the email is a near word for word copy of the one she actually uses, built from her own wording and her own flyer graphic.

Two victims, one scam

Josh Planos, vice president of marketing and communication at the Better Business Bureau, points out that this kind of fraud produces two separate sets of victims: the vendors who pay for a spot that does not exist, and the business whose name and material get borrowed to make the approach look real. The event itself did nothing wrong and sent nothing. The scam works by copying what is already public: social media posts, flyers, website text, and sometimes a lookalike website built to mirror the real one.

The tip-off in this case came from the outside in. A vendor who received one of the fake emails noticed something off and contacted Mabry van Dieren directly, rather than paying first and asking questions later. That single check, made before any money moved, is what stopped the scam from working on at least one person.

Planos names the clearest warning sign in this kind of approach: an unusual request for payment. A legitimate vendor fee request rarely asks for bitcoin, gift cards or a person to person payment app. Any of those, attached to an invitation that otherwise looks professional and on-brand, is the signal worth acting on before a form gets filled in or a fee gets paid.

This is the shape of scam Flggd's monitoring is built to catch early: a real organisation's name, graphics and wording repurposed by someone else, often weeks before most of the people targeted notice anything wrong.

What to check before paying a vendor fee

• Contact the event directly through a number or page already known to be genuine, not one in the email.
• Ask whether the named contact person actually works for the event.
• Treat a request for bitcoin, gift cards or a peer to peer payment app as a stop signal, not a formality.