Hey so I got this comment on a fic that seemed genuine and reading it makes me believe they did in fact read the chapter. I replied saying thank you and some other stuff and then they asked it we could âmove this conversation onto another platformâ. Iâve gotten my fair share of scam bot comments on ao3 and bots in DMs on here and something about it really threw me off. I feel like this person is being genuine but the scam bot red flags are unfortunately raised. Not sure what to say to them tbh
report them. it is 99% a scam and they were most certainly baiting for a reply from you by âacting like a genuine readerâ at first, so that you lowered your guard. since these bots seem to be learning that mentioning anything about discord (or other social media platforms) in the first comment will most likely get them reported â since more and more people are starting to notice their pattern.
they may even mention a specific scene from your fic or a specific character by name, since theyâre getting smarter. how do they do that? my guess is that they ran your fic through ai and let ai write a comment for them â with specific charactersâ names or specific scenes from your fic â so that they looked legit.
(but they sometimes make mistakes by âcommenting on the wrong ficâ, so some people are getting comments that mention characters that arenât in their fics â characters they donât know or write about, from fandoms they donât know or write about â or scenes that arenât from their fics at all. hereâs an example of what Iâm talking about.)
more about bots and scams on ao3âs comments section here
vaporwave
kianamaiart
ellievsbear
