🔎Scam Exam(ination)🔍
Seen as: You should DM me / Message me Scam Type: Free Money Scam
As the saying goes, nothing good is ever free.
Everything has a cost, and if you fall for a scam like this?
You may find yourself losing far more than you wanted to gain...
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How it starts:
The way this scam starts is simple. You receive a comment on a post, a direct message, or an ask from someone you don't know asking you to message them. Yes, it's that simple on the outside. But this scam can also come with ✨extras✨ in an attempt to entice you as you'll see below.
You may even receive something akin to this message:
If $1,500 was deposited in your what will you use it for, be honest. Send your <payment> tag.
Which, if you've heard about that type of scam before, you'll know that it circulates on social media platforms like facebook, instagram, discord, and tiktok.
This scam on tumblr is pretty much the same thing.
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🚩Red Flags🚩
The account isn't older than a day or a week at best. (You can check this by viewing blogname.tumblr.com/archive.)
The account has no posts, is 'blank' or has obv stolen pictures. (blank = no avatar/header)
The account openly says something like this:
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First contact:
If you contact these individuals, several things may happen.
1- You may be asked to be their 'sugar baby' or they will claim to be a 'sugar mommy/daddy'. They will say they will give you a weekly allowance, free gifts, or even promise you funding for trips just for talking and spending time with them. They may also offer to pay your bills and take care of you if you are someone who has posted about financial troubles.
2- You may be told that the person contacting you is just a wealthy individual simply looking to 'give people money' out of the goodness of their hearts and they want absolutely nothing in return. Or that they won the lottery and have too much and that they're just ✨giving it away✨.
But, sadly, they do want something from you.
The catch:
Where the scammers get you with this scam is that they usually tell you that they need some sort of 'favor' from you before you receive your first official gift or payment from them.
Remember: this is meant to be free money. So why would you need to give them anything, right?
1- These scammers may request you pay a 'small fee' to cover things like shipping costs of a fake check (ftc.gov) or item they want to send you. This would require you giving them your bank information which you (for obvious reasons) should not do under any circumstance.
2- They may ask for your PayPal, Cash App, or Venmo, and upon you sending it to them, they will doctor up a fake screenshot that shows that they sent you a payment and/or that something 'went wrong'.
In reality: they did not send you anything.
From here these scammers will then ask you to send money to their preferred address to 'verify' the transaction or 'unlock' the account. (which.. isn't how it works, by the way.) And upon receiving your $20-$50+, they take your money, block you, and leave.
3- This is the most annoying one of all. They start hyping up how they made all of this glorious and wonderful money, and they ask you to go to a website and invest in it with Crypto.
From here it is an obvious Crypto investment scam. And any website they send you to will either a) phish you, or b) it is fake and they will manipulate it to manipulate -you-. You'll think you're making money, and you'll invest more and more, and then when they have thousands of dollars, they'll steal it from you.
Here is a video from the YouTuber/Twitch streamer Kitboga where he talks about how these websites and this scam works in detail and shows you how he dove into this scam head first with recorded calls with these scammers. And trust me, they are very convincing.
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Final thoughts: If you're someone who needs money, be it for medical reasons or something personal, getting messages like this can be really dangerous. 'Free' isn't 'free' especially in the case of free offers on the internet. There will always be a catch one way or another.
Always trust your gut and don't be afraid to ask questions.
Also remember to report messages like these when you receive them so that tumblr can look into it.
Stay safe everyone. :)
