Getting paid for your work as an artist is vital; otherwise, you’re just volunteering.

In today’s story, a young woman’s aunt refuses to pay her for artwork she created for her business, but the artist ends up finding out that her aunt has done much worse things.

Let’s see just how many lies her aunt has told…

Hello again, I’m the girl/artist who’s aunt tried the old “I’m giving you experience and exposure” instead of paying me for some art I did for her real estate business. Just a quick update and then I’ll try to let this fade away…

At the beginning of the year my Aunt Jay (by marriage) asked me to do some artwork for her new real estate business.

We had a verbal agreement that she would pay me.

She was demanding, insulting and mean from the get go, and I was out a ton of time, quite a bit of material costs very quickly.

She wanted me to fly out on my own dime to finish up and paint a mural I designed.

I asked for payment on everything I’d already done and she freaked out and screamed at me.

Aunt Jay was hiding something.

Tuesday, I went to my schools licensing/legal aid office, they helped me draft a letter to cease using my work and an invoice.

Aunt Jay called my mom calling me an “ungrateful brat.”

Mom called Aunt Jay’s supposed real estate company to say that one of their agents was not paying for services rendered.

Company had no idea who Aunt Jay was. This caused my Uncle to look into things and it turned out Aunt Jay had taken out a few credit cards in his name only and maxed them out.

Probably for her Escalade, new “real estate agent” wardrobe and office.

Aunt Jay lied about a few things.

My update was Wednesday so in the following 2/3 days quite a bit more information has come to light about what Aunt Jay was actually up to.

She’s actually not in as big of trouble as I and everyone on the last post assumed but it’s still pretty bad.

So first of all we learned that she probably never told anyone other than my uncle that she was working for the nation wide real estate company in question going to call it ProRealty (my last fake name may have been a little to obvious).

It doesn’t look like she had any clients, never brokered a single deal, she may have taken a few people around to look at houses but we aren’t even sure about that.

It looks like the “soon to be ProRealty franchisee” thing was just a lie to get my uncle off her tracks about where this huge influx of cheaply financed money was coming from.

She had told him that ProRealty had financed her new Escalade and that they had helped her rent her office.

Aunt Jay hurt her chances of doing business as a real estate agent.

Since she never actually claimed to be a certified ProRealty agent in order to defraud people, it doesn’t look like the company itself has any legal recourse against her.

However my mom (extreme extrovert, opposite of me) who has become fast friends with the most senior agent in my hometown and he is (or has, not sure) going to report my aunt to the state board of real estate to have her new (as of last fall) license reviewed and probably suspended.

Even if this doesn’t happen, she is essentially blackballed from ever doing a deal with ProRealty and according this senior agent, something like 45% of home sales in my town happen with a ProRealty agent one either side of the sale.

So even if Aunt Jay doesn’t lose her license, she’s effectively chopped half of her business potential right from the get go.

She now realizes why Aunt Jay didn’t want her to paint “boats.”

One thing that absolutely came out of my last r/prorevenge post was that two actual “ProRealty” agents commented and it was because of them that I was able to figure out a huge chunk of the puzzle.

So the real life version of this company uses a very identifiable form of transportation on their logo but to keep this anonymous let’s say that ProRealty uses a boat.

When Aunt Jay was first talking to me about doing work for her she was oddly adamant that I don’t use any “boats” in any of the work I was going to do for her. I mean actually forcefully direct instruction was “no boats!”

In my head at the time I was like, I’m not one to paint boats anyways but point taken.

Aunt Jay is also getting divorced.

Well as me and my family now surmise, while she knew she was already fraudulent, she was still trying to walk a line of not getting on ProRealty’s radar in any way shape or form.

She knew they could really mess up her plans if she were to be seen driving an $80,000 Escalade around town with anything resembling ProRealty’s “boat” plastered all over it.

But to me it shows she absolutely knew she was up to no good and I hope this can be used in the divorce.

So onto my uncle, I don’t know all the ins and outs of how separations and divorces work but as I understand he contacted a lawyer Wednesday afternoon.

They were working to file some sort of emergency separation motion with the courts as soon as they possibly could in order to make sure she couldn’t do any more financial damages to him.

She might get her artwork back.

One thing that I thought was really cool of my uncle to do was that his lawyer did (or is in the process) of filing paperwork so she has to turn over all financial records and declare all assets related to her “business” and my uncle specifically asked the lawyer to include the oil painting and logos I’d already shipped to her.

So while I’ll never get paid, at least I may get my work back.

The lawyer is also figuring out what to do about the identity theft.

One thing that is totally screwed up and I totally don’t understand is that my uncle has pretty much paid for everything since they’ve been married (about 5 years) and Aunt Jay literally committed identity theft against him.

Her uncle is staying with her parents.

He is still the one who has to leave the house so at least until he can get a place on his own, he’s staying with my parents.

My dad says my uncle is basically broken over this, that he didn’t see it coming and actually bought into the bullc*** about ProRealty financing a car for someone who didn’t even work for them.

This makes me feel bad because I brought it all to light but my dad says my uncle appreciates it because Aunt Jay could have gotten in much deeper and she didn’t really have a chance to try to and cover up fraud with more fraud.

So still a lot I don’t know but this is where we are today. My uncles lawyer doesn’t have a timeline for the divorce, I guess it will just depend if stupid Aunt Jay actually finds a lawyer who will put up a fight or if she just tries to fade away.

Wanting to get paid for artwork sure exposed a lot more lies!

Let’s see how Reddit responded…

This reader shares a somewhat similar story (but without the fraud).

This person feels bad for the uncle.

Another reader knows this must be painful for the uncle.

Here’s some advice for her as an artist.

This reader thinks Aunt Jay might be hiding even more secrets.

I would stay away from Aunt Jay, but keep uncovering the secrets!

Everyone secretly loves a good snooping.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check this one out about a man who created a points system for his inheritance, and a family friend ends up getting almost all of it.