#scambaiting

[valdevia]

Let me tell you the story of how I not only wasted a scammer's time for days, but scared him really bad by making him live through a bespoke body horror story:

Like most good scams, this starts with a random DM right here on this hellsite. A man claiming to be a Canadian wildlife photographer (with a stolen profile pic) asks to buy the rights and ownership to my art.

I first think it's an NFT scam, but I'm surprised to see it's a new one, so I keep prodding.

This gets funny when the scammer claims they sell the rights to companies such as "Samsung, Oxford, iPhones etc"… and there's government officials and an online gallery involved?

So I ask him which pieces he'd want to acquire, to see if he'd come up with a reason for the "iPhones" company wanting to buy the rights to weird body horror.

And to my astonishment he just goes for it? At this point I'm finding this so baffling that I start scambaiting him live on stream (wink wink)

And I decide I'm gonna keep upping the stakes and weirdness until he stops replying… So here's what I come up with…

I pretend to be a doctor attending to an outbreak of a strange new disease. Clearly he'll realize I'm messing with him?

But he keeps going!

So I tell him the patient has died on the operating table and that I really need this contract to cheer me up. He offers his condolences.

At this point I'm too invested. So I plan the next part of the story. Now I'm infected with the body horror tooth growth disease.

He replies curtly. Are we losing him? We gotta bring out the big guns.

So I spend an afternoon making Beckett a bespoke piece of art to convince him I'm VERY sick. I gotta make it as gross as possible.

Then I stop replying.

Is Beckett now under the impression that his new potential client has died in horrible pain as teeth grew over his body? Maybe!

In any case, that's the end of this scambait. And I hope it leaves him with a bad taste in his mouth when he tries to scam more people!

I don't usually make art specifically to scare people, but just like slapping a mosquito that steals your blood, I think it's OK to scare a scammer really bad. And honestly, I had a lot of fun with it. Hope you liked it!

[luwha]

LMAO so, recently someone tried to SCAM me, so i'll show you what happened and the telltales of it being a scam.

This one is quite obvious but i know people who are just starting their artist careers and might not have experiece.

Follow the thread:

🚩#1: They pick your most famous/Popular art as reference. They don't know what you actually sell.

🚩#2: They will pick a random popular character. They're not roleplayers or anything. They're not here for the art in any level

You ask me, what are the odds they really like Goku? Oh, well, you'll see. At this point i check their profile for anythign that might indicate it, but as you'll see you won't have to.

🚩#3: They say they saw my ToS. On it i state i only work with paypal and google forms.

🚩#4: Random issue with payment method. They might have a real problem with it, but see; they'll never ever accept any other payment method, such as Zelle, CashApp, Payoneer, Ko-fi, etc.

I already knew this drill so, let's continue.

🚩#5: I love playing dumb lmao. Anyway, this scam revolves on them either sending you "too much money" and asking it back or something like it. I won't be following through because i know it'll be annoying.

BE ADAMANT WITH YOUR METHODS. Do NOT EVER bend them for randos.

🚩#6: They're so ready with the info on how the payment works it's fucking funny.

The reason I PERSONALLY use PayPal INVOICES (no any other payment within paypal) is that they're safe for both me and my client. My rules are stated clearly.

MAKE A ToS I BEG YOU YOUNG ARTIST

🚩#7: They're not even a good scammer lmao they REFUSE to go on my PROFILE to get a link or read anything.

I use Forms because it collects the client requests and it's easier for me to read it all in one place. It ALSO makes scammers bored.

🚩#8: They're so disinterested on the art they don't care for posing, vibes, colors, nothing. Again, they're NOT here for art. That's hilarious.

🚩#8: Same as above. They don't care for posing or anything.

On my art they link me, i have a vampire almost staking himself in a state of euphoria.

IMAGINE VAMPIRE GOKU STAKING HIMSELF THAT'S SO FUCKIGN FUNNY MY BRO, THINK YOUR SCAM THROUGH MAYBE

🚩#9: They will price your own work for you. And they'll overshot what we, smaller artists, charge for it.

They'll overshot by a lot.

They want you to be impressed and showing "generosity" usually gets people who need monay into risky situations. That's just plain cruel.

🚩#9: Same as above. Over generosity and eagerness to pay.

They're not even with the sketch, this haven't been an hour, they don't have any work form me but OH GOD they're SO READY to pay you NEED TO KNOW they WANTS TO PAY YOU SO BAD

Lmao yeah it's working out ❤️

THIS ONE IS JUST HILARIOUS BRO I CAN'T EVEN.

ANYWAY let's continue

🚩#10: They don't know me. They don't follow me. They broke every rule on my ToS. They're making me go through a payment method i am unfamiliar and don't use.

They don't care for my process. They're not interested on my sketch.

BE. ADAMANT. ABOUT. YOUR. RULES. AND. PROCESS.

Now, for the beautiful closure of this:

Have a ToS. Don't bend the rules for randos.

Use Invoices. Be sure you're safe.

Use forms if you'd like. Requests through DM and Discord ARE COMMON FOR OTHER ARTISTS. I personally don't like it, i have ADHD.

Being an artist on an online space is dangerous. If you need help, poke an artist you know, see how they operate and if it fits you. Most of them would help you.

🚩#11: goku isn't even on their icon 😭

This is the account that tried to scam me.

#art is life ❤️

[avyofthemegacoven]

there’s nothing more fun here than having creeps DM you and ask if you want to be their sugar baby, bc then I get to respond with unhinged shit with no feeling of guilt. . .

I just replied to one telling him sure, but he’s gotta join my Cult first. And admittance Into our cult requires that he makes a blood sacrifice to the demon we worship.

[wolsalwastaken]

PNGtuber and voice reveal!

Check out my videos about scams on tumblr and see my comedic genius trolling. It’s funny, I promise. I mean I thought it was funny but if you don’t find cringe and farts funny then you’ll probably hate this…

[shroomishroomcatte]

This is what you should do whenever you get one of these.

These are all scams/bots and you should respond with absolute hatred and fury.

-🐐🐲🐈A (she/they/it/goat)

[factual-entropy]

This telemarketer would not shut up about crypto even when I told them I wasn’t interested. Time to break out the high explosive

[gothhabiba]

What people miss with regards to the Jordan Neely/Daniel Penny story is that Penny didn’t choke him out because he’s a bad person. He did it because of socioeconomic factors which made him desperate. The alternative to him being found not guilty would be him going to prison, and that wouldn’t have been justice. Penny needs to be treated with grace and care in this undoubtably troubling time for him

I think my scambaiting post must be going around because I'm getting some asks about it. I'm mostly just deleting them if they're not interesting or instructive, but I think this one actually might be.

My OP made a gesture at a materialist analysis which should be performed. This material analysis would have to do with the flow of money, labour, and resources as it actually exists in the world: the extraction, extortion, and theft of raw materials; the purposeful, violent destabilisation of entire regions by the military arms of the USA, Canada, Europe &c. to force people to work for pennies, so that labour will be incredibly cheap compared to what it would cost if performed by most citizens in the imperial 'core'; and other measures that are taken to ensure that value flows from colonised nations to colonising nations. (These measures also include the devaluing of institutions in the 'periphery' such that advanced degrees from certain countries are simply worth less than others; and the restricted ability of those in the 'periphery' to travel or migrate across borders with the freedom afforded to those with imperial citizenship.)

So certain people are in a situation where structures and enforcers of power have made them poor and desperate on purpose so that they can be 'superexploited' at a level beyond that experienced by most people in the imperial 'core'. This is the purpose of imperialism, and it's the purpose of the concept of 'race.' People work in factories for very little money, because the imperial periphery is supposedly only good for the production of raw materials (fabric; t-shirt blanks; assembly of parts of electronics &c.); the design, the artisanship, the packaging, the 'refining,' the making of the chocolate bar from the cocoa, everything that confers 'value' to the item, is done in the imperial core, and that increased 'value' / sale price is added to the GDP of the country in which the product is completed.

In fact this 'raw material' is not 'raw' at all, and it also invovles design and artisanship—but the people of the 'third world' cannot 'design' anything and they cannot be 'artisans'—nothing they make can be labelled as 'handmade' or 'hand-sewn' even if it is literally made with their hands—because they are not considered as people in that way.

But that's the product realm. In terms of the internet (even setting aside the physical materials, space, energy, water &c. required to maintain the internet):

Things (such as Amazon's failed "Just Walk Out" thing) are advertised as "artificial intelligence" despite the fact that thousands of people in India are forced to do work that is tedious, time-consuming, and often horrific and traumatising (consider content moderation!!) in order to make them work. Their material conditions—which are created and maintained, in the most violent manner imaginable, on purpose in order to force them to do this work—render many people desperate enough to take these jobs.

If there are people, who are reachable online, who at a baseline are making a hundred times what you are making, whose currency has incredible purchasing power where you live, and you can get some of that money—if you can work for yourself this way, obviously you're going to do that. This happens because there's money to be made in it. If people can set up an operation and train hundreds of people in how to do this, and take most of the profits and still provide a salary that's attractive to people because of how high the margins are, then obviously that's going to happen. This is just, the concept of capitalism. If there is a way to make money doing something, someone is going to be doing that thing.

Material analysis is looking at the world as it actually exists, in order to figure out how materials, labour, and value are 'flowing' on local and global scales, as a means of determining why things happen the way they do. Like, on a base level, that's what it means to analyse something—to try to figure out why it happens the way it does.

This anon, in sending this ask, didn't understand what any of this meant, or didn't want to consider it, or something. They were unable or unwilling to consider a different lens than that of personal desert, personal merit, and innate personal badness / criminality. The concept of trying to understand where money is, how it moves and why, as a base level of knowledge necessary to understand why there is money to be made in doing certain things, doesn't compute to them—so they have to move things back into the realm of personal desert, and act like I'm saying that people who commit acts of interpersonal violence "deserve" to be allowed to commit that violence as long as they're going through something, whether or not the thing they're going through created the necessary circumstances for, or has any other direct relation with, the act of violence being committed (basically "some people commit violence to cope").

All of that is kind of typical—it's very normal for people to act like asking them to consider people in the 'third world' as actual human beings with human things like "circumstances" and "motivations" and "thoughts" that influence their actions is tantamount to spitting in their grandmother's face.

But what's most interesting to me about this ask is how, in order to dismiss the idea of material analysis as necessary to understand why things happen and to reassert an interpretive framework of individual criminality, anon uses the idea of interpersonal racial violence as something that we can all agree is caused by innate criminality and not by material factors. As if by comparing scamming to this act of violence, it emphasises the innate criminal personality at the root of both acts. As if, obviously, we can all agree that people who commit this kind of violence are just evil demons who "deserve" to be locked up—so saying "the material fact of present-day colonialism creates the conditions for this kind of scamming" is tantamount to saying "we shouldn't lock criminals up in prison." If the latter statement is unthinkable, then so, by comparison, is the former.

Except that this concept of "the criminal" as being a specific "type" of person who uniquely does and deserves evil, and who needs to be locked up in a cage for the good of the rest of society, is exactly what I am, in fact, intending to question. I think the anon would be surprised to learn about the vast body of work (I mean texts, but also direct activism) conducted under the heading of "prison abolition."

[thescaryhyperfem]

"autistic people and their niche interests-" Scambaiting.

"what" Scambaiting.