We've talked about the dangers of getting scammed by fraud photographers and other fake wedding vendors before. Turns out wedding vendors can get screwed over too. Here's one wedding photographers real story of almost getting scammed...

I recently received an inquiry from a woman (supposedly?) who was asking if I would fly out to Hawaii over the winter holidays to take family portraits at a reunion. Cool, right? I was excited. Always wanted to go to Hawaii!

Everything seemed on the up-and-up... until they told me they would not pay my travel expenses up-front and wanted me to accept a payment for their event planner, who would only take cash, and then send it to the planner myself. They also seemed to not want to use Paypal - urging me to use intuit.com or bluepay.com. I immediately thought of stolen credit card and charge-back scams, and informed them I could not accept the job if all of it was not paid in advance, and could not accept a payment for someone else.

I then did some research to see if there were any scams like this going around, and found an article warning against pretty much the same thing ...

Recently, [photographer Brian Ambrose] said he received an email from a potential client requesting a family portrait, and he said something didn't feel right...

Those red flags included the fact that the scammer would not communicate over the phone, was overly flexible with timing, and wanted to pay Ambrose extra money that he, in turn, was supposed to give to their event planner.

"As a photographer, I have to talk to you. I have to find out exactly what you are looking for and I can't do that through an email," Ambrose said.

Officials from the Better Business Bureau said if Ambrose had fallen for the trap and tried to forward that fee to the event planner, it was likely from a stolen credit card and he would be on the hook for the money.

The goes on to advise to contact the Better Business Bureau or the Department of Consumer Protection if I thought I was a victim of this scam - which I immediately did. As well as contacting Offbeat Bride, which is where they found me - pretty clever, as we're always looking for unique events and this is not a catch-all site like Facebook advertising, so the Offbeat Bride inquiries we get have a way of seeming more legitimate.

It was pretty sophisticated, as the whole point is to get you to send on a payment to someone else, which then you will be out the money for when the credit card is reported as stolen and the credit card company reverses the charges. Not only that, but the travel involved would have made me out thousands of dollars and miles and miles from home. There's was a complex story involving six families flying out to a family house in Kauai (which was visible, and not sketchy at all, when I looked at it on Google Street View) and wanting a certain amount of prints and the event spanning five specific hours...etc. So sophisticated that there were three days of correspondence before we even got to the catch!

Photographers - especially solo female photographers - need to be very careful about clients. Our information is out there, on purpose, actively trying to gain new clients, but doing so also makes us targets for scams and luring schemes. (I was once contacted about flying up to the Sacramento area to photograph a birthday party, and got chills when I saw how far away the address was from civilization, and that the customer wanted to pick me up at the airport himself rather than pay for a rental car. No way!)

As much as we would like to be open to opportunities that seem too good to be true, it's definitely important to trust your gut. If you get a bad feeling, do your research. And always share your experiences with the community - we need to look out for each other!