Is Wetpixel Breaking Bad?

The diving world is small, and it seems most everyone knows the personalities, some even thinking of them as trusted friends. So when that trust proves to be misplaced, people feel angry and betrayed. It appears Adam Hanlon of Wetpixel has betrayed that trust. It's a sorry tale.

Wetpixel.com describes itself as "the premiere community website dedicated to underwater photography and videography. With up-to-date news, articles, gear reviews, photo contests, and dive expeditions, Wetpixel is a strong, focused community of over 35,000 underwater image makers."

Started more than two decades ago, Adam Hanlon of Heysham, in the north of England, bought the website.

It's hard to make money from a website alone, so Hanlon organizes group trips abroad for Wetpixel members, with a markup for himself, and collecting their money before they traveled. Though trading as a limited liability company, it was not a UK-registered tour operator.

A first inkling of a problem occurred when divers who had prepaid a hefty sum for a Wetpixel trip to Indonesia on the MY Damai in late 2022 arrived at the dock to board the craft, but while they had paid Hanlon for the trip, Hanlon had neither confirmed nor paid fully for it. The owner, Alberto Reija, an honorable caballero who felt quite sorry for them, ran the trip anyway, hoping to get paid eventually by Hanlon.

Reija told Undercurrent he never did get fully paid, despite sending several emails and even offering to accept Hanlon's payments over several months. Hanlon ignored Reija's emails. Even though Hanlon's customers had paid him upfront for crew tips, Reija ended up tipping his own crew.

Indonesian's Lembeh Resort was to host back-to-back photo workshops in October 2020 by Alex Mustard that had been marketed through Wetpixel. Most attendees had paid fully by then, but the workshops were postponed until 2022 because of COVID. Danny Charlton of Lembeh Resort told Undercurrent that to host the workshops, he needed to get from Hanlon the number attending, the rooms required, and to receive prepayment. Hanlon ignored his innumerable emails, text messages, and WhatsApp calls.

Charlton was wary. Hanlon collects tip money in advance from his customers to pass on to the resort. No one knows how much he collects or whether he passes all of it on, but he was slow to pay after a 2018 trip, and "after three months and me badgering him, our staff received about three percent of the spent value in tips." (Can you imagine Americans leaving only three percent?)

As it turned out, when the guests showed up for the workshops with Mustard, Lembeh had yet to be fully paid. At first, they had to put up their own credit cards, but Charlton confirmed he eventually got paid some but not all he was owed.

Dr. Alex Mustard MBE, a doyen of the underwater photography world who runs world-class photography seminars, wasn't paid for this and another trip he ran on behalf of Wetpixel. More important than his fee, he cites missing tips for hardworking staff.

"When I arrived at Lembeh Resort without Adam, Danny (Charlton) asked me to check in with Adam about the gratuities because, Danny told me, he had been slow to pay them in 2018, and with him not attending, they wanted to raise the matter. This was a surprise, as I had assumed that Adam usually paid this gratuity in the resort - as he always reminded the guests that they had already paid [the gratuities to Adam]and he was taking care of it. These still remain unpaid for the March trip. . . . .I don't know the amount that Adam billed the guests for this, but since Wetpxiel was loyal to a small number of resorts and liveaboards and most of the guests were regulars."

It seems, at first, Hanlon failed to pass on the money he had collected in advance for dive staff gratuities. He upped his game by failing to pay resorts and liveaboards and finally descended into keeping his client's money and not booking them.

The Word Gets Out

It was only recently that Wetpixel members discovered they had a shared experience as Hanlon continued to offer trips.

Earlier this year, Austrian Wolfgang Schreibmayer was among the first to sound the alarm on social media. Recently, he told Undercurrent that he had booked a September 2023 trip for himself and his wife a year ago and paid his last installment to Hanlon this March. Then he discovered, but not from Hanlon, that the Red Sea trip on Alain Sobel's MY. VIP One had been canceled, and Sobel had booked other passengers because he had not been paid by Hanlon. (Sobel has confirmed this.)

Another client of Hanlon's, Sandra Holloway (Coronado, CA), paid him $4300, the last installment in March '23, for back-to-back Red Sea trips departing this September. After contacting Sobel, she was shocked to learn she had no spot on the VIP One. "[The] last time Adam communicated with me was April 2023," she told us.

Paul Sambier (Ottawa, Canada) reckons he's still awaiting a $10,000 refund from trips that were canceled in 2020 due to Covid. He told us, "The worst part of it is that, because Adam Hanlon kept promising to refund the money and I trusted him because he was the agent for Alex Mustard, I postponed making a claim on my travel insurance until it was too late to do so."

John Warmington from Vanuatu wrote, "I am gutted by, it to be honest - a stalwart of the industry, the head of Wetpixel, the man that waxes lyrical in his forums about fraud, [appears to be] a conman. Being in Vanuatu, it is very difficult and costly for me to recover this $5000 for the trip I paid for in January 2020, and my only saving grace will be the knowledge that he is removed from the industry and stopped from doing this to anybody else."

Just What is Going On?

Adam Hanlon was ill. Or so he said.

Caroline Wells, a UK resident, said, "I continued to chase for my money [equivalent to $5000] until Adam asked for patience as he had suffered a heart attack. I left it for three months before sending further emails, but although Adam had had a heart attack and wouldn't be able to dive and was unable to respond to emails, he published several more trips. She eventually was reimbursed."

Hanlon offered Michael Hanchak (Cheektowaga, NY) a refund for his canceled Lembeh trip, Hanchak told us, "Over the next 18 months, I received nothing but notices of Hanlon's ill health, until he told me he was trying to resell my spot. I reminded him that was not the original offer and noted [part of] the monies paid were to cover gratuities. I was never reimbursed."

John Warmington told us that "Since March, the only correspondence has been after he replied to a final demand from me with a response that he was too sick to handle it."

Alex Mustard told me, "Hanlon had told everyone that he was seriously unwell, and everyone believed him - he was our friend, after all. He hadn't been online since March/April -- which made sense if he was ill. He couldn't reply to emails or speak on the phone."

What Are Friends For

Not too long before John Davis (Denver, CO) started preparing for his September 2023 trip, he was horrified to learn from the boat that he and his family had never been booked. He had paid $8,600 to Wetpixel nearly a year in advance, plus it cost him airfares to London and overnight hotels. He had used a credit card that included trip insurance, but when he contacted his credit card company, he was told that trip cancelation due to fraud by the trip organizer wasn't covered. It was also too late to challenge the card payment, thanks to Hanlon's prevarications in the preceding months. He told Undercurrent, "Apart from the financial loss and my ruined family trip, I am astounded that someone [I thought] I'd known for 16 years would do this."

The Effect is More Than Money

Five thousand dollars is the most Jessica Pierce (Standish, ME) had ever paid for a trip, but it was canceled, and Hanlon has yet to refund her.

She says, "I am so devastated that I haven't booked a trip since. I have spent countless hours and sleepless nights trying to get my money back. I emailed the resort directly and they said they didn't have any money from him for me and that he hadn't been in touch. He prevaricated over these refunds by saying he hadn't been well, but it doesn't take much to make a bank transfer, and he's been healthy enough to take money for other trips since."

Another victim anonymously posted, "I have lost joy and interest in underwater photography and trips. I'm still so shocked and upset that this has happened. It had really taken the fun out of it for me."

Let's Hear From Hanlon

I telephoned Hanlon to hear his side of the story on August 29. He refused my face-to-face interview offer because he was "too ill." He said he would only reply to our questions via email. (Of course, he was off teaching in the quarry the next day.)

I asked him if he intended to make reparations to those whose money he held. From the responses we received, we'd guess the amount exceeds $100,000.

He replied, "I understand that Wetpixel Ltd and I need to engage with [our] creditors. This is somewhat complicated by some of them, including the principal creditor, not actually communicating with us. For example, we have yet to receive final invoices for flight expenses, despite these being owed. Wetpixel Ltd has physical assets that can and will be liquidated to repay creditors. Wetpixel Ltd is currently liquidating [those] assets in order to pay off creditors. Wetpixel also has been approached by a number of potential purchasers. Assuming a sale goes through, this will alleviate the liquidity problem too, or at least go a significant way towards doing so."

Knowing it would take me days to unravel his answer, I asked why he continued to accept payments if he knew the company was in trouble. And who benefitted from the money received by Wetpixel Ltd (a £100 limited company with no paid-up shares and few expenses) since the client's money was obviously not in an escrow account?

He replied that Wetpixel was not in trouble. But Adam Hanlon is. While he talks about Wetpixel as a distant corporate structure, he states on his website, "Wetpixel is owned and published by Adam Hanlon."

Hanlon readily admitted in an email that Wetpixel was not a licensed travel agent (or insured with ATOL/ABTA under British and EU law). He claimed he merely held members' money in trust so that they could get a better group discount on bookings, but that did not explain why he couldn't reimburse people. He also told us Wetpixel Ltd had made a bad investment in a dive center in the Far East (which he could not name).

I decided to pay a call on Adam unannounced and drove 262 miles from my home in London to Capernwray, where he often teaches diving classes in Jackdoor Quarry, hoping to find him. But, nope, "He's underwater," I was told by a dive site operative. He was out teaching in the quarry. And it's a cold quarry at that. The owner of Capernwray Dive Center was at pains to point out to me that the dive center has no other connection with Hanlon other than he uses its facilities.

He's Fooled No One

Mustard told Undercurrent, "There were lots of people having problems with Wetpixel, but everyone was keeping it to themselves until mid-August. Hanlon is just keeping money from Wetpixel trips and this seems to have been going on for about a year and [it] is escalating. On top of this, there are quite a lot of people on these trips who booked and then canceled. Hanlon resold their spots and then never refunded them as agreed. When people posted about this on [the] Wetpixel [website], Hanlon would delete the threads and ban them as members. I even had personal messages to me about it deleted."

"I have found this whole situation hard to believe. If this were someone I didn't know, I would be shocked and angry. But Adam is someone I know well; he is a friend and he has taken this money from his friends - [Wetpixel] photographers, resorts, and diving staff - which really amplified these emotions. I still don't understand it."

Mustard continued, "Many of us considered him a close friend and feel very sad and shocked by this. If he were in financial problems, most of us would have happily given him credit until he could repay. But he just totally stopped responding to communications."

What about the "dive center in the Far East"? Mustard commented, "Whether he spent the money on a dive center or in Vegas, it still wasn't his money to spend."

We asked Mustard if anyone was taking legal action. He replied, "For now, most are prioritizing getting the story out so nobody else is duped. Then to figure out how and if we can all get our money back. Sadly, he's lied at every turn, so I don't see any reason to believe him. Best to probably publish what he says and let the reader decide."

It's Not Over

A final word from Wolfgang Schreibmayer: "There is another Wetpixel event scheduled for November 2023. Potential participants better check with the vessel owner before making more payments or booking any flights." (https://wetpixel.com/tigersharks23).

We contacted Epic Diving and they told us, "Wetpixel does not have that trip reserved with us. We did have several divers reach out asking similar questions, but fortunately no one has had a reservation for the trip that we're aware of."

No surprise there.

- John Bantin