There’s never a way to be 100% sure, but I’m going to throw in my two cents that this smells very much like a scam to me.
The predominant evidence is:
- a relatively new blog; this one seems to have done a slightly better job at covering its tracks, a lot of scam blogs don’t even bother staying up for more than a few hours before they start begging, whereas this one’s earliest post is February 6th
- among the blog is no indication of any personal information right up until the asking for money begins; personally i am all in favor of owing people on the internet no information about yourself, but having a completely impersonal account right up until you make a post begging for money and then proceeding to dump out a lot of personal information at once is a pattern common among scam blogs; they’re willing to put in effort to make the blog look populated, i.e. reblogging things to show that there’s activity, but not enough to spend time crafting an actual human identity because why would you when things could fall apart at any moment and you’d just have to start over? It’s not cost-efficient.
- sending random asks to strangers asking them to reblog a pinned post begging for money. This happens with real fundraisers too, but those are also often perpetuated by the individual’s friends and the like, as they have an actual human presence to reach out to. Scam blogs, meanwhile, are completely impersonal and have no options beyond hoping they can get complete strangers to believe them, and so this is their only method of gathering attention.
- a sad story made to play on the asker being a vulnerable individual in need of your money NOW, there’s no time to wait, no time to stop and think about if it’s real, you have to act NOW NOW NOW GIVE GIVE GIVE; these stories also tend to play on common hurts/fears among the communities they’re imitating, a cruel stepfather with no mention of anyone else besides the older sister; where is the rest of the family? Are there no friends who could lend help? Why is the first go-to asking strangers on tumblr for money?
- a lack of a continuing story; many scam blogs make the one post and then spam asks to people, with no further information or updates ever being given, whereas the majority of real fundraisers i’ve seen are constantly providing updates on the situation and showing a continually progressing situation more reflective of the real world, scams often just put up the initial heartstring puller and then say nothing else, there’s no storyline because there’s no actual story
Now, none of these things mean that the individual is NECESSARILY a scammer, there’s always the possibility of them being genuine! We’re all strangers on the internet and there’s never a 100% way to be sure unless you literally know the person in the real world, but I’ve gotten plenty of scams in my inbox before and gone deepdiving into their blogs to search for evidence of realism and tracked down every individual in the to alert them notes when I could find none. I notice these patterns now and all I can say is that this looks like a classic scam blog to me, it ticks just about every box on the checklist, the only exceptions being that they put in the effort to start populating the blog a few weeks back (though there is still only a few scrolls worth of posts present) rather than a few hours as most do, and the absolute balls to go for a major blog instead of preying almost exclusively on small and unknown blogs, counting on them not having the network to catch on before it’s too late.
We can’t know for sure, and if you’re genuine then I’m so sorry for everything you’re going through sweetheart, but I personally doubt it is as you look like a scammer through and through.