Fun With Scammers
Had another scam review on one of my stories on FFN this week. You know, the usual: "I loved your story, I think it would make a great comic, contact me on Discord at [scammer's username]!"
Per my usual, I saved the email with the copy of the review (because it contains a scammer's Discord name), then sent a reply (done on FFN via private message; there's no public way to respond to reviews) telling them that sounded cool, and here was my Discord username and to send me a friend request and mention it was about the comic.
Of course, the reality is that I gave them the previous scammer's Discord name. There's a reason I save the email copies of any reviews/PMs/AO3 comments I receive that contain the scammer's off-site contact info.
Now, most of the time when I do this, I hear nothing back. I assume they realize they've been given a dead lead and choose not to engage further. This time, though? I received a message back the next day saying they reached out to me but didn't get a response because, and I'm using their words here: "my old fanfiction was banned." They than asked for my Instagram.
Instead, I responded with, "Oh no! Any idea why your account was banned?" Knowing full well, of course, that they were probably nuked for being a scammer. (Wow, the FFN staff actually doing something? Shocker!)
They responded back (all capitalization/grammar theirs): "no, this has never happened before this is the first time something like this has happened"
When I went to respond, the new account had also been nuked. So no chance to drag it out further or point out that I know they're a scammer or anything like that. Oh well. No further responses have shown up in my inbox.
I don't get the wild and wacky spambots on AO3, but at least I occasionally get a tiny bit of entertainment on FFN. 🤷♀️
