Original post written by Ahmar Wolf
Friends. I’ve watched the scammer problem evolve on this platform over the years.
Scammers started this fight with an upper hand. We as a community weren’t prepared for this. We didn’t have a community ready to look out for these scams. We didn’t know what this would look like.
Today, we see a different battlefield. Users actively call out scammers that enter their groups. A lot of furries know what the red flags are and can explain why this is a problem to their group admins.
It’s gotten a lot harder for scammers to pull the casual scams.
So, now they are intensifying the severity. If they can’t scam a lot of people for a few bucks they are going to try to scam a few people for everything.
These sorts of scams lead to people losing their life savings and have directly lead to more than 27 suicide attempts in my country.
Nearly a thousand groups have adopted the countersign bot. Many use rainrat bot. Some import our list to use with rose bot. A couple have made their own robot with our API.
Most groups seem to be taking some sort of proactive measures now.
But for various reasons we see some groups resisting removing scammers, even after being shown proof. Some worry about the fall out if they accidentally ban someone and they turn out not to be a scammer.
It’s a valid concern, particularly given the history of ‘call out’ style lists in our community and their questionable accuracy.
A lot of the lists that I think have caused concerns ran anonymously and used basic tooling to take snapshots of ‘problem’ groups. Once they were created they were static. No way to get off them, no way to see who is running it, no way for the community to chime in on if something is right or wrong.
We are aiming to do things differently.
Reports here are initially submitted by y’all. A team member does an initial research phase and marks each report as true, false, or needs more research.
Once reports have enough info to be considered valid they are marked true, where they then get reviewed by me personally.
I’ve spent the last 15 years in cybersecurity. Some roles directly involving brand security and banking fraud. That skill set lets me see more below the surface that your average user can and helps drive both the tooling and decisions.
I review the report, the research, confirm everything and the account id numbers, then add them to the list.
We usually don’t dump all of the info we received in a report into the new listing. We summarize it. By keeping some of the details to ourselves we’ve been able to show victims what specifically scammers are lying about mid-scam. It lets us keep scammers in the dark on how to avoid us and limits how they can craft their lies.
So, accountability.
I’m Yumi Kitsune. I’ve been in the fandom since 2007. Always as Yumi Kitsune.
I take accountability for this list and this project. I am the only one who can add or remove people. If a mistake is made my community should judge me accordingly.
Now, I ask group admins to be accountable.
When a user gets scammed from someone they met in your group that user is going to start asking if you knew about the scammers, about the community efforts to combat them.
Knowing and doing nothing isn’t a good look.
Take accountability before something happens, so you don’t have to take accountability once there are community posts about xyz ending up in the hospital or dead from this sort of scam.
Users. Screenshot when you tell admins about scammers. Start holding people accountable for harboring them and letting them find new victims. When something goes wrong, have the receipts.
I see these victims regularly. See the threats sent to them. The harassment these scammers perform after.
I’m fed up, I think the community is getting fed up. It’s time for accountability as a community.
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