Heeeey all. I've posted a lot about the AO3 comments scams that have been going around since late 2024, and yesterday, I shared a well-sourced video that discusses the explosion of long con scams in general since 2020. For anyone who's curious about this kind of thing, those links might be useful for you, but I think they also help explain why this comment I got a few days ago immediately pinged my scam radar:
(Yes, since then, AO3 support has responded to me and confirmed that the account is posting spam. I'm not slandering some random new user)
So, red flag #1: the comment came in on a fic I'd just posted that day. This is very consistent for these seemingly innocuous comments—they'll pop up the day a new work is posted or the day a new chapter goes up.
Red flag #2: I don't recognize the user at all. I'm sure this wouldn't work for very popular creators on AO3 who get loads of comments, but I know all the people who comment on my stuff and rarely get new commenters. So that was odd in itself.
Red flag #3: the comment is extremely vague and generic. It doesn't mention characters or anything that happens in the fic, but unlike short comments by real people, the message has a very... 'email they sent to a work colleague with whom they're friendly' vibe to it. That's pretty standard, too.
Red flag #4: when I went to the user's profile, I saw that, shockingly, it was a brand new account and completely blank. For a while, these scammers were including weird amounts of contact info in their AO3 profiles (you can see examples in the posts I linked to at the top), but lately, they've been more bare bones.
Red flag #5: the comment is such weird overkill. This is probably more specific to the fic I posted that day, but if it had been a long, complex story, I might have just thought the commenter was being extremely generous with their wording. The thing I posted, however, was a 600 word fluffy scene where nothing 'captivating' happens 😂 Like I said, weird overkill.
I think that covers my main reasons for immediately being suspicious. I wanted to explain them because a lot of people I've spoken to about these spam comments don't suspect them right away. And it really sucks having to be paranoid, but here we are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As I mentioned, AO3 confirmed that the comment was spam, and they took it down. I also saw another comment from the same scam account yesterday, but by the time I got the reply from AO3 this morning, that comment was gone. So it may be that they're mass deleting comments by those spam accounts now? If anyone has insight on this, I'd love to know.
Anyway, just to give another example of the wording of the comment, here's a screenshot of it:
Vague again, and the fic was a one-shot, so mentioning a chapter is fishy.
I hope this helps prevent a few people from getting sucked into these long con scams. I still don't know exactly how they play out beyond the scammers offering to do paid art commissions, but obviously, they're making money with the comments or they wouldn't be flooding AO3 with them.
areudirty
jacobvanloon
kaledo-art
titsay
jbbartram-illu
ellievsbear
stormborns
yousharknotpass
tangentwithtanner
kianamaiart
