We encourage everyone in the vendor community to share this message with one another:
We have seen a reported increase of instances on Facebook and Instagram of people attempting to scam prospective vendors by purporting to be "selling" the last few vendor spaces for our previous events (SJMADE Fest 2024, SJMADE Summer Fair 2024, Sidewalk Shops 2024, Foster City Summer Days 2024). Additionally, we have heard about scammers doing this with other events all over across the entire industry.
In many of these cases, the scammer asks for payment via PayPal, Venmo, Zelle or some other form of digital payment after filling out a Google Form. Please note that these people (i.e. the scammers) are not associated with San José Made in any way (nor have they ever been associated with San José Made).
We never sell vendor spaces through social media direct messages or even text messages for that matter–we haven't in the past, we don't do this now, and we will never do so in the future. We only sell vendor spaces through our official website (sanjosemade.com). We would never use a personal social media account and personal PayPal or Zelle or Venmo accounts to coordinate a transaction for a booth fee.
If you ever encounter communication online from a non-SJMADE account purporting to be associated with SJMADE, please feel free to contact us at either events@sanjosemade.com or info@sanjosemade.com. We would be happy to verify for you whether or not the communication you've received has officially come from us.
We only use events@sanjosemade.com, info@sanjosemade.com and in select instances, our team's respective email accounts (always ending with @sanjosemade.com or in some cases, @mvbl.co, which is our parent company).
Please note that we cannot honor any vendor booth spaces that were purchased through channels that were not ours.
It's deeply frustrating and sad to hear about scammers targeting small business owners and taking advantage of their enthusiasm to be part of events. We hope that by providing a centralized message here that we can help increase awareness for these scams throughout our community of creative small businesses and communities of creative small businesses everywhere; and in doing so, root these scammers and scams out of our communities entirely.
Once again, if you have any questions about this or anything related to this in the future, please email events@sanjosemade.com. Thank you.
-San José Made Team