#scams

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

I don't feel bad for anyone here

[characterssaythedarnestthings]

Tumblr bots and scammers really need to learn how to cater to their Tumblr audience. Look, all I'm saying is they'd be much more successful at robbing people if their spam messages/asks looked like this:

Hello 👋🤩 It's me, The Doctor 🪛👨‍⚕️ and my TARDIS 🟦🚨 has crash landed 😱🛸💥🔥 and I need you 👉👈 to transfer £1000 🤑💸 so I can repair it 🛠️🪛🪛🔨 I would appreciate 🥰 it and give you a free 💸 trip 🚗 through time ⌚ and space 🛸🌌 as a reward 💸💸💸🎁 Please hurry 😥😰 Allons-y 🏃

[evilcado]

Hello there! My family needs to leave Gaza out of necessity . I suffer from nightmares that are so closely resemble reality that I no longer Differentiate between reality and a dream.Thank you for taking your efforts and time in reading my plea. There are no words to describe the horrors unfolding in this place,never expected to find myself in this situation. Because of this horrible situation I have decided to come before you guys for a financial support so that I can evacuate my family from this hell that we are into.The funds will be strictly used for the evacuation . I will personally bear any additional expenses incurred.Your support will make a significant difference in alleviating the suffering of my family ,We urgently need any kind of support before it is to late. As time ticking away translates to lives lost in Gaza I'm here and ready to answer any questions or concerns you may have.Kindly reach out and connect with me

This dudes a scammer guys‼️

$700 is way too little to evacuate a whole family for border control fees

PayPal is blocked off in Palestine, the mainly used platform being gofundme

The tags are wrong and attract attention from only vaguely related communities

[prokopetz]

I just got another one of those phishing emails where it pretends to be a confirmation of a subscription you never signed up for and tries to trick you into providing personally identifying information for "confirmation purposes" when you attempt to cancel, but:

a. this one is for a weekly grocery delivery service, of all things; and

b. the fake shopping list contains nothing but ham.

I have been fraudulently subscribed to ham.

[river-taxbird]

There is no such thing as AI.

How to help the non technical and less online people in your life navigate the latest techbro grift.

I've seen other people say stuff to this effect but it's worth reiterating. Today in class, my professor was talking about a news article where a celebrity's likeness was used in an ai image without their permission. Then she mentioned a guest lecture about how AI is going to help finance professionals. Then I pointed out, those two things aren't really related.

The term AI is being used to obfuscate details about multiple semi-related technologies.

Traditionally in sci-fi, AI means artificial general intelligence like Data from star trek, or the terminator. This, I shouldn't need to say, doesn't exist. Techbros use the term AI to trick investors into funding their projects. It's largely a grift.

What is the term AI being used to obfuscate?

If you want to help the less online and less tech literate people in your life navigate the hype around AI, the best way to do it is to encourage them to change their language around AI topics.

By calling these technologies what they really are, and encouraging the people around us to know the real names, we can help lift the veil, kill the hype, and keep people safe from scams. Here are some starting points, which I am just pulling from Wikipedia. I'd highly encourage you to do your own research.

Machine learning (ML): is an umbrella term for solving problems for which development of algorithms by human programmers would be cost-prohibitive, and instead the problems are solved by helping machines "discover" their "own" algorithms, without needing to be explicitly told what to do by any human-developed algorithms. (This is the basis of most technologically people call AI)

Language model: (LM or LLM) is a probabilistic model of a natural language that can generate probabilities of a series of words, based on text corpora in one or multiple languages it was trained on. (This would be your ChatGPT.)

Generative adversarial network (GAN): is a class of machine learning framework and a prominent framework for approaching generative AI. In a GAN, two neural networks contest with each other in the form of a zero-sum game, where one agent's gain is another agent's loss. (This is the source of some AI images and deepfakes.)

Diffusion Models: Models that generate the probability distribution of a given dataset. In image generation, a neural network is trained to denoise images with added gaussian noise by learning to remove the noise. After the training is complete, it can then be used for image generation by starting with a random noise image and denoise that. (This is the more common technology behind AI images, including Dall-E and Stable Diffusion. I added this one to the post after as it was brought to my attention it is now more common than GANs.)

I know these terms are more technical, but they are also more accurate, and they can easily be explained in a way non-technical people can understand. The grifters are using language to give this technology its power, so we can use language to take it's power away and let people see it for what it really is.

[softlyfiercely]

DO NOT VOLUNTEER TO BE A CO-SIGNER OR GUARANTOR FOR SOMEONE ON TUMBLR.

I just saw a 'mutual aid' post going around where instead of asking for donations, the person was asking someone to be a "guarantor" - also known as a "co-signer" - for their rent.

DO NOT DO THIS.

I am all for mutual aid. I think credit scores are a scam designed to fuck poor people. I get it. I do. BUT. Being a guarantor/co-signer for someone basically means that if they don't pay what they owe, for whatever reason, their landlord, bank, creditors, etc. can and will come after you for the full amount.

It seems like such an easy way to help someone. You don't need to pay any money, just lend them your name and good reputation so they can get permission to borrow and spend their own money. It feels like you're getting one over on the shitty capitalist system and using your privilege of good credit/income to help someone else.

But it is a HUGE risk. Do not do this. All it does is give that shitty system more ways to get their hooks into you and create tons of problems for you down the line.

You can really fuck yourself over in the long run by getting tangled up in a financial situation like this. Even co-signing for someone in your life who you trust, like a sibling or a parent, can be really risky. No matter how much you trust someone not to purposefully leave you holding the bag, now you're on the hook if they end up with financial problems neither of you anticipated.

Do not co-sign for another person's loan, car, rent, etc. unless you are able and prepared to pay the full amount or subject yourself to the mercy of whatever that person gets themselves into.

ESPECIALLY do not do this for someone on the internet, where scams are rife. Do not share your personal information with people online and NEVER allow someone else to use your personal information for their finances.

Here is an article with more information.

[unashamedly-enthusiastic]

Tried to tip a tumblr blog at 1am and it was such a suspicious transaction it immediately put a full fraud freeze on my account

Fortunately, banks no longer just ask 'did you make that transaction' they want to make sure you weren't scammed into making that transaction and 5mins after their call will give away all your money anyway.

This is an honest to goodness life saving movement and I cannot be happier banks are adopting it

Unfortunately, it meant I had to have the most embarrassing financial call of my life

-

Me: Ah yeah I was just trying to tip a tumblr blog

Cash: right and were you directed there by a Facebook link? An Instagram advert?

Me: no I was just on tumblr...on purpose

-

Caah: and this person asked you for money?

Me: oh no they just had a funny story, which happened to be about money and I thought, "wouldn't it be funny if I tipped them"

-

Me: * covering a reblog by reblog update on the adventures my mutual was having *

Cash: okay I don't think that can actually happen though..

Me: It might not have, but i was happy to tip them just because it was funny

-

Cash: and how well do you think you know this person?

Me: *considers explaining how much I know about a beloved mutual without ever knowing their name or face* ... I have no idea who this person is

I think in the end Cash decided there was no saving me from myself

[mostlysignssomeportents]

I assure you, an AI didn’t write a terrible “George Carlin” routine

There are only TWO MORE DAYS left in the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

On Hallowe'en 1974, Ronald Clark O'Bryan murdered his son with poisoned candy. He needed the insurance money, and he knew that Halloween poisonings were rampant, so he figured he'd get away with it. He was wrong:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Clark_O%27Bryan

The stories of Hallowe'en poisonings were just that – stories. No one was poisoning kids on Hallowe'en – except this monstrous murderer, who mistook rampant scare stories for truth and assumed (incorrectly) that his murder would blend in with the crowd.

Last week, the dudes behind the "comedy" podcast Dudesy released a "George Carlin" comedy special that they claimed had been created, holus bolus, by an AI trained on the comedian's routines. This was a lie. After the Carlin estate sued, the dudes admitted that they had written the (remarkably unfunny) "comedy" special:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/george-carlins-heirs-sue-comedy-podcast-over-ai-generated-impression/

As I've written, we're nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we're well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

AI systems can do some remarkable party tricks, but there's a huge difference between producing a plausible sentence and a good one. After the initial rush of astonishment, the stench of botshit becomes unmistakable:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy

Some of this botshit comes from people who are sold a bill of goods: they're convinced that they can make a George Carlin special without any human intervention and when the bot fails, they manufacture their own botshit, assuming they must be bad at prompting the AI.

This is an old technology story: I had a friend who was contracted to livestream a Canadian awards show in the earliest days of the web. They booked in multiple ISDN lines from Bell Canada and set up an impressive Mbone encoding station on the wings of the stage. Only one problem: the ISDNs flaked (this was a common problem with ISDNs!). There was no way to livecast the show.

Nevertheless, my friend's boss's ordered him to go on pretending to livestream the show. They made a big deal of it, with all kinds of cool visualizers showing the progress of this futuristic marvel, which the cameras frequently lingered on, accompanied by overheated narration from the show's hosts.

The weirdest part? The next day, my friend – and many others – heard from satisfied viewers who boasted about how amazing it had been to watch this show on their computers, rather than their TVs. Remember: there had been no stream. These people had just assumed that the problem was on their end – that they had failed to correctly install and configure the multiple browser plugins required. Not wanting to admit their technical incompetence, they instead boasted about how great the show had been. It was the Emperor's New Livestream.

Perhaps that's what happened to the Dudesy bros. But there's another possibility: maybe they were captured by their own imaginations. In "Genesis," an essay in the 2007 collection The Creationists, EL Doctorow (no relation) describes how the ancient Babylonians were so poleaxed by the strange wonder of the story they made up about the origin of the universe that they assumed that it must be true. They themselves weren't nearly imaginative enough to have come up with this super-cool tale, so God must have put it in their minds:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/29/gedankenexperimentwahn/#high-on-your-own-supply

That seems to have been what happened to the Air Force colonel who falsely claimed that a "rogue AI-powered drone" had spontaneously evolved the strategy of killing its operator as a way of clearing the obstacle to its main objective, which was killing the enemy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/04/ayyyyyy-eyeeeee/

This never happened. It was – in the chagrined colonel's words – a "thought experiment." In other words, this guy – who is the USAF's Chief of AI Test and Operations – was so excited about his own made up story that he forgot it wasn't true and told a whole conference-room full of people that it had actually happened.

Maybe that's what happened with the George Carlinbot 3000: the Dudesy dudes fell in love with their own vision for a fully automated luxury Carlinbot and forgot that they had made it up, so they just cheated, assuming they would eventually be able to make a fully operational Battle Carlinbot.

That's basically the Theranos story: a teenaged "entrepreneur" was convinced that she was just about to produce a seemingly impossible, revolutionary diagnostic machine, so she faked its results, abetted by investors, customers and others who wanted to believe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos

The thing about stories of AI miracles is that they are peddled by both AI's boosters and its critics. For boosters, the value of these tall tales is obvious: if normies can be convinced that AI is capable of performing miracles, they'll invest in it. They'll even integrate it into their product offerings and then quietly hire legions of humans to pick up the botshit it leaves behind. These abettors can be relied upon to keep the defects in these products a secret, because they'll assume that they've committed an operator error. After all, everyone knows that AI can do anything, so if it's not performing for them, the problem must exist between the keyboard and the chair.

But this would only take AI so far. It's one thing to hear implausible stories of AI's triumph from the people invested in it – but what about when AI's critics repeat those stories? If your boss thinks an AI can do your job, and AI critics are all running around with their hair on fire, shouting about the coming AI jobpocalypse, then maybe the AI really can do your job?

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

There's a name for this kind of criticism: "criti-hype," coined by Lee Vinsel, who points to many reasons for its persistence, including the fact that it constitutes an "academic business-model":

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

That's four reasons for AI hype:

to win investors and customers;

to cover customers' and users' embarrassment when the AI doesn't perform;

AI dreamers so high on their own supply that they can't tell truth from fantasy;

A business-model for doomsayers who form an unholy alliance with AI companies by parroting their silliest hype in warning form.

But there's a fifth motivation for criti-hype: to simplify otherwise tedious and complex situations. As Jamie Zawinski writes, this is the motivation behind the obvious lie that the "autonomous cars" on the streets of San Francisco have no driver:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/01/driverless-cars-always-have-a-driver/

GM's Cruise division was forced to shutter its SF operations after one of its "self-driving" cars dragged an injured pedestrian for 20 feet:

https://www.wired.com/story/cruise-robotaxi-self-driving-permit-revoked-california/

One of the widely discussed revelations in the wake of the incident was that Cruise employed 1.5 skilled technical remote overseers for every one of its "self-driving" cars. In other words, they had replaced a single low-waged cab driver with 1.5 higher-paid remote operators.

As Zawinski writes, SFPD is well aware that there's a human being (or more than one human being) responsible for every one of these cars – someone who is formally at fault when the cars injure people or damage property. Nevertheless, SFPD and SFMTA maintain that these cars can't be cited for moving violations because "no one is driving them."

But figuring out who which person is responsible for a moving violation is "complicated and annoying to deal with," so the fiction persists.

(Zawinski notes that even when these people are held responsible, they're a "moral crumple zone" for the company that decided to enroll whole cities in nonconsensual murderbot experiments.)

Automation hype has always involved hidden humans. The most famous of these was the "mechanical Turk" hoax: a supposed chess-playing robot that was just a puppet operated by a concealed human operator wedged awkwardly into its carapace.

This pattern repeats itself through the ages. Thomas Jefferson "replaced his slaves" with dumbwaiters – but of course, dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, they hide slaves:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

The modern Mechanical Turk – a division of Amazon that employs low-waged "clickworkers," many of them overseas – modernizes the dumbwaiter by hiding low-waged workforces behind a veneer of automation. The MTurk is an abstract "cloud" of human intelligence (the tasks MTurks perform are called "HITs," which stands for "Human Intelligence Tasks").

This is such a truism that techies in India joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians." Or, to use Jathan Sadowski's wonderful term: "Potemkin AI":

https://reallifemag.com/potemkin-ai/

This Potemkin AI is everywhere you look. When Tesla unveiled its humanoid robot Optimus, they made a big flashy show of it, promising a $20,000 automaton was just on the horizon. They failed to mention that Optimus was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Likewise with the famous demo of a "full self-driving" Tesla, which turned out to be a canned fake:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

The most shocking and terrifying and enraging AI demos keep turning out to be "Just A Guy" (in Molly White's excellent parlance):

https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1751670561606971895

And yet, we keep falling for it. It's no wonder, really: criti-hype rewards so many different people in so many different ways that it truly offers something for everyone.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

Image:

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

Ross Breadmore (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/rossbreadmore/5169298162/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[voidify333]

Discord scam alert

If you get messages like this from a discord friend’s account, your friend has just become the victim of a phishing scam and the scammer is trying to get you too.

But my friend got his account back within an hour of this conversation, and your friend can get theirs back too.

The MO: using this scare story, the scammer tricks people into changing the email on their account to give the scammer control of the account. Once they have control, they use the hijacked account to send the scam pitch to all the victim’s friends

The motive: to try to get people who have nitro to bite, so the scammer can steal their credit card

Here’s how to keep your account safe and help your friend

DO NOT follow any of the instructions your friend’s account sends you. The scammer will lie to you and give you instructions to hand over control of your account.

DO:

Keep your cool. The scare story is a lie. The scammer has no power to force you to follow their instructions, they only have lies to try to trick you into it.

Ghost the scammer. It’s what I did as soon as I realised this was definitely a scam (I smelled shit immediately because my friend has a totally different typing style, but it would be harder to recognise coming from a random acquaintance), and they didn’t persevere any further after the end of the screenshot. Scammers target the vulnerable and avoid wasting effort on more difficult victims; if you ghost them they will sense you’re not biting and leave you alone.

Contact your friend on another platform if possible, to confirm that it’s not them and let them know they’ve been hacked

Direct your friend to the discord support ticket platform— my friend got his account back in like 30 minutes by sending a “hacked account” ticket here.

If your friend has nitro, make sure they get going on cancelling any compromised payment methods before the scammer can steal their money

Take this as a lesson to avoid repeated passwords and turn on 2FA on all your accounts, especially ones with any payment info attached— even if you think you’re too smart to get scammed, everyone has moments of not paying attention, and that’s what scammers prey on

[neechees]

Raisedeyebrowemojii Scamming information post

So as some of you know, it's been revealed that @raisedeyebrowemojii was a scammer, and for those of you that don't know, I'm sorry you had to find out this way. This is going to be an information post on raisedeyebrowemojii's scamming, lies, the evidence, and where they stole from, and the debunking of all their claims as comprehensively as possible to help the people they scammed and manipulated get some closure, and hopefully to provide insight on how you might spot them again.

I carried out an investigation on the now confirmed scammer, and now deactivated user @blktransdyke, who deleted within hours of my callout post. On that post I connected blktransdyke as being the same person behind raisedeyebrowemojii due to the information both of them had posted for alleged fundraisers, which you can see in the post here. For a short recap, both blktransdyke and raisedeyebrowemojii "Jay" both had the exact same story of allegedly being trans/homeless/disabled and posted photos of the exact same brown tabby cat named "Trouble", both claiming that it was their "best friend's cat" and raisedeyebrowemojii created a patreon for Trouble the cat, only for me to find that Trouble the cat is a hyperpopular cat vlogging/fanpage with 42K followers on facebook, and both of these blogs stole from this page and neither of them were affiliated with this famous facebook.

Moving on, with some help, ive also found more evidence that raisedeyebrowemojii was a scammer. I know many people were already convinced by the callout post I already did, but I think it's important to debunk a lot of raisedeyebrowemojii's claims due to the fact that so many people thought they were genuine, that they had died, and due to the fact that they stole pretty much every detail of their alleged life from somewhere else, and I can prove it, so I want to clear things up, and maybe allow some people to gain peace in the knowledge that "Jay" did not die, and was never in danger of dying to begin with.

The rest of this post will be under the cut because again, this is going to get long. I encourage everyone who was approached by or donated to raisedeyebrowemojii to reblog to help get the word out, thank you. Image descriptions will be available in alt text.

For starters, raisedeyebrowemojii went by the name "Jay", and on the donation posts of theirs (scams), they used the paypal name "Jay Baldwin", and Jay claimed to be disabled (allegedly they had tourettes, autism, cerebral palsey, were deaf, in a wheelchair, had a terminal kidney disease, and allegedly other undisclosed disabilities), Canadian, that they lived in the city of Toronto (in Ontario, Canada), and a trans lesbian. Screenshots for that below

Misuse of terminology & racefaking

Let's talk about their bio first. I suspect that the scammer behind this blog is neither Black nor Canadian, due to the fact that, as I mentioned in this post, 1. Black Canadians don't really refer to themselves as "African American" as much here in Canada, partly due to the fact that a lot of Black Canadians actually have roots from the Caribbean & not directly from Africa or America, 2. "Jay" claimed to be Canadian but also said they had an uncle & grandparents still living in South Africa, which means they're implying they're either a first or second generation African Canadian immigrant, so why would they call themselves "African American" if they have no national/ethnic ties to America, and they are Canadian? So, like the blktransdyke blog, who i proved is most likely the same person as raisedeyebrowemojii, both of these blogs are using incorrect/strange terminology for the ethnicities they claim to be, thus indicating racefaking and a falsified Nationality.

Falsified Nationality

Here I also have reason to believe this person is not Canadian, or in the very least, did not live in the city of Toronto, or likely the province of Ontario. Partly due to the evidence ive just given above, but also due to the reasons I'm about to give & the connected next point I'll get to soon. For one example, "Jay" made the donation post in the first screenshot i gave where they claimed they were scared they were going to freeze to death, and that they could hardly even type on their phone due to the absolute insane cold temperatures of Toronto.

However, I took a look at the Toronto weather forecast for the day that raisedeyebrowemojii posted that update (February 12th, 2023) and found that the temperature had gotten up to 6°C (or 42.8°F), with very little wind, and it didn't even get below freezing temperatures that day, and only got two degrees below freezing the night before (which is when they claim they were staying in a shelter). Canadians will know that this type of temperature in FEBRUARY is actually very very warm and pleasant. Like, unseasonably, weirdly warm. Screenshot for that below.

Now, for an actual homeless person, being outside in the cold, even if it's warmer than usual, this is still difficult and harsh conditions to live under. However, this is still a large exaggeration from what Raisedeyebrowemojii claimed it was, and youre not very likely to freeze to death in this kind of weather compared to the usual Canadian temperatures. The way "Jay" described it makes me think that it is not a Canadian who made this post, and is someone who was not in Toronto to actually know what temperature it was that day, but just assumed it would be very cold.

Impersonation of the real Jay Baldwin

Thanks to some help (of people whom I will keep anonymous for their safety & as a precaution of the scammer harassing them), i managed to locate the identity of the REAL Jay Baldwin, and was able to concretely find out that this person is who raisedeyebrowemojii was impersonating. So, who is the real Jay Baldwin you ask?

Jay Baldwin is a Black, disabled (who uses a wheelchair and has Cerebral Palsey) nonbinary Canadian and the founder of the private Facebook support group "Disabled, Queer, and Fabulous" with over 1.1K members, and is a student at Carleton university in Ontario, Canada, and this Jay Baldwin has actually been doing really well for themselves, and has gotten pretty famous in the Ottawa area. And, as you can see, the raisedeyebrowemojii "Jay" apparently has a lot in common with THIS Jay Baldwin, including their names, being Black, a disabled wheelchair user with Cerebral palsey, nonbinary, Canadian living in Ontario, and both use they/them pronouns. But let me show you how I know they've been stealing from this person.

One way I can tell that raisedeyebrowemojii definitely was not THIS Jay Baldwin is their faces. On the screenshot to the left is the icon that raisedeyebrowemojii (of allegedly "themselves") used for their blog, taken from the webarchive screenshot of their blog, and to the right is a cropped portrait photo of the real Jay Baldwin, taken from this information page on the official Carleton University website, which also lists most of the information I just listed about the REAL Jay.

Obviously these two people look absolutely nothing alike. And we can tell that raisedeyebrowemojii meant for their scamsona to look like the person on the left, because they also used a photo of another dark-skinned Black person in ANOTHER donation post. So they stole these selfies from a different person altogether, although I haven't yet been able to locate where they'd stolen them.

One of the reasons that raisedeyebrowemojii's lies were so convincing though is that they were stealing or misconstruing some of Jay Baldwin's life experiences almost in real time, and I believe that raisedeyebrowemojii was keeping tabs on Jay in order to harvest their life details. For example, on a Facebook post, Jay Baldwin mentioned the death of their father a few times, but also on June 26th 2022, made the memorial post below about the death of their uncle

and meanwhile, on August 25th 2022, raisedeyebrowemojii ALSO suddenly started saying that their dad died, which you can see on the screenshot of their tumblr profile, which as webarchive screenshot shows, was not there before. While they changed the dates, raisedeyebrowemojii was clearly pulling from the real Jay's life, so it looks like we can see around the time that the dcammer decided to randomly incorporate this into their scamsona. As far as I can find, raisedeyebrowemojii never made a donation post regarding their "Father" and said that he was abusive, so adding this detail from the real Jay's life shows that it was unnecessary except to look more real and to manipulate people into believing them.

In the ways that raisedeyebrowemojii misconstrued things, they also of course constantly used the story that they were either homeless or on the verge of being homeless. Where Jay would post facebook updates of doing very well and being happy in life and even doing & hosting events for disability rights, raisedeyebrowemojii around the same time would post about needing money due to either allegedly starving, of dying, needing medical attention, or being homeless.

Below are screenshots of, in the order that they appear (so we're going chronologically in time that these were posted by both raisedeyebrowemojii and Jay Baldwin respectively) from left to right, raisedeyebrowemojii asking for money on February 16th 2023 talking about being in allegedly horrific conditions, then Jay Baldwin posting a peppy update on facebook, looking very happy and having a drink with the caption "Cheers to life!" on February 22nd, and then another donation scam post by raisedeyebrowemojii begging for money saying they're "on the streets" and "will die", posted on February 26th 2023.

You'll be happy to know that the real Jay Baldwin is not homeless or food insecure, and seems to have had a good relationship with both of their parents and is in an accepting home, unlike what raisedeyebrowemojii claimed THEY had, and claimed they were being abused. Raisedeyebrowemojii likely falsified all that while still impersonating Jay and keeping tabs on them in order to create a false sense of urgency whenever they wanted money at random.

Normally I wouldn't go into this much detail about the people who were stolen from in scams, but I feel like this case in particular it was important to point out where the scammer was pulling from to debunk their lies, but also because the real Jay Baldwin has become quite an iconic figure in their area, and all this information was taken from multiple publicly available sources, and so I can only assume that Jay is comfortable with this personal information being known.

Little to no life details, interests, or personality outside of the impersonating Jay Baldwin, and manipulation

As I'm sure many of you know by now (as ive mentioned it in previous posts, and that some of you currently reading this were victims of the scammer), but raisedeyebrowemojii contacted multiple, predominantly Black users to attempt to befriend them, and they did this in order to appear more legitimate, and most likely so that they had "friends" to call upon should any of their scams have been questioned. We've also seen this with multiple other scammers where a new blog will appear and suddenly start tagging mostly Black users to ask them to (unknowingly) reblog their scam posts.

And as a more famous example, we've seen this with the famed scammer Laura Deramas where she befriended multiple users to get them to stick up for her.

But to get down to the title's point, outside of the life details they were stealing or misconstruing from the real Jay, Raisedeyebrowemojii didn't have much of their own personality or traits, which is common in scams. Say, for example, a scammer will create a scamsona who is a lesbian and loves cats and is making a fake donation post for a sick cat, and so in order to make their blog look more convincing, they will randomly reblog popular posts from tags about cats or lesbianism.

In Raisedeyebrowemojii's case, we had one user mention that while Raisedeyebrowemojii was trying to "befriend" them, Raisedeyebrowemojii would only answer very generic questions asked of them despite the fact that they sent the messages first appearing to try to get to know that user, like answering "I like reading!" Instead of answering what their favorite books are if asked about their interests. Below is a screenshot of that conversation. This user emphasizes that they never got an answer to the last question they asked.

"Kidney disease" and alleged "death"

I stated on my blog that I believe raisedeyebrowemojii randomly said that they were diagnosed with a "terminal kidney disease" (allegedly chronic kidney disease) specifically with the view that they could leave, deactivate, or abandon their blog and then move onto ANOTHER scam blog (and likely this was the blktransdyke blog) without looking suspicious or weird, because then people would just assume they had died, which is exactly what happened.

Raisedeyebrowemojii stopped posting around June 2023, and the blktransdyke blog appeared in early April 2023, which makes me think this is when they started to move to that blog or potentially even another blog we don't yet know about. Funeral scams, or scams where the scammer pretends their persona has "died" in general is not new and is actually pretty common. It's possible that raisedeyebrowemojii was going to (or may still attempt) to return on another blog and pretend to be a family member or "friend" of the raisedeyebrowemojii in order to ask for alleged "funeral money", which we've seen with blogs like the now deleted blog @destrawberry.

But the main reason I think why they stopped posting in specifically June is because that is around the time the real Jay Baldwin was gaining popularity again, doing multiple public events, and was doing very very well, so I think the scammer became aware there was now more of a chance of people discovering their scam. In June, Jay won an award at an LGBT film festival for a documentary they had made ("Supporting Out Selves") and an Academic Hospital wrote a piece on their success, and in August they announced that they teamed up with ASE Community Foundation for Black Canadians with Disabities to host their 3rd student summit in September. You can find evidence of this by googling or by looking at Jay Baldwin's facebook, but of course, please give respect to the real Jay Baldwin & do not pester them.

Conclusion

All in all I hope that this clarifies a lot of things for those of you that were confused by all this, and again, I extend my dearest sympathies to those who donated to raisedeyebrowemojii and were manipulated by them, I know the feeling and I'm so terribly sorry that it's happened to you too. I advise any Black users especially to be very cautious about any new blogs with a donation post up that is new, and this new blog is trying to ask you to reblog their donation post: it's common for scammers to retarget anybody who may have donated to them, talked to them, or even just barely interacted with them before.

I'll put some of raisedeyebrowemojii's old paypals, gfm accounts, etc in either the replies or another reblog, because for now I'm running out of space. If you donated to them at any point, i suggest you report their accounts where you did the donating. And in the mean time, my colleague @kyra45 is taking testimonies on raisedeyebrowemojii, so if you have an experience with this scammer and would like to share that experience with us so we can document this scammer's behavior, please send Kyra an ask.

[conspiring-limabean]

so apparently the tumblr donation scam farms are moving in on Palestine; this includes both slapping basic phrases like "Free Palestine" into their blog headers, but also some of them go so far as to claim they are Palestinian refugees who need donations.

Here is your routine reminder that whenever you receive an ask in your inbox requesting donations, check their ass. 19 times out of 20 it'll be a brand new blog who reblogged a few posts to seem older than they are, is sending out spam asks to random blogs, and will be deleted in a few days once they've already scammed people.

Check their blog's age by trying to scroll to the bottom and checking the post timestamps. Turn on post timestamps by going to Settings > General Settings > Dashboard Preferences. On any device, you can also see when a post was made by clicking on the 3 dots at the top right of it. Scam blogs reblog an amount of posts to try to seem like they aren't brand new and pretend to have older accounts, and it’s very successful against people who don’t scroll down enough.

Check the location and area code of a PayPal link where/if it says something like country.x=xx. The xx will be a country code. Most tumblr donation scams are for some reason in the Philippines and will have the code PH. No I am not saying to distrust anyone in the Philippines who needs donations, but if a brand new blog is claiming to be a refugee in the Middle East but their PayPal link is from halfway across the world, then well...

Reverse-image search any of the images they use and find if it was stolen somewhere. Remember that these images are often edited to prevent people from easily doing this, and this is not reliable but can be an easy sign if successful

Be careful with blogs that request people send donations through "Friends and Family" on PayPal because you cannot refund money sent in this manner. This isn’t a dealbreaker as many regular users also request this to avoid fines, but is an addendum to scam blogs when enough other red flags are raised. It isn’t unusual for them to insist on receiving money through FaF to the point that some will refund money not sent through that manner to prevent accountability

Follow scam busting blogs like Kyra45 that might pull up evidence you otherwise would not have access to. I guess I'm going to start bringing back my habit of recording the exact paypal addresses that scam blogs use which has sometimes been the only evidence of a new donation blog being a scam, and no one would know this if I hadn't been tracking them

It is disgusting that people would take advantage of an ongoing genocide for their own gain. Please remember to keep an eye out for yourself and the people you follow reblogging suspicious donation posts trying to steal aid from people undergoing a tragedy

[comicgeekscomicgeek]

If you have to say you’re not a scam, you’re a scam. REPORTED AND BLOCKED!

[c-rowlesdraws]

while waiting for my iPad to charge so I can draw on it, I had a small adventure on twitter (oh, I’m sorry, I mean 𝕏) reading about this man with far too much money, “Zero” (a name many people call him, according to himself), who has taken it as his life’s mission to defeat mortality through obsessive exercise, diet, vitamin supplements, and penis injections:

He is, of course, separating gullible nerds from their money by selling his own branded meal and exercise plans, diet foods (including something called “nutty pudding” that looks like a little cardboard cup of grainy, dark brown mud)… and extra virgin olive oil, the most specialist olive oil to ever be pressed, the KEY to immortality, with the blandest and most underwhelming label design imaginable:

That looks like the branding on a ream of printer paper. It’s $37.50-per-bottle olive oil. Incredible. BUT—it’s sold as a TWO-bottle deal! $75 for two of them! The website has no option to just order one. But why wouldn’t you want two of them?? Don’t you want to #dontdie???

And of course. The punchline to all of this that isn’t the penis injections or the reveal that he’s recording his “max urination speed” and taking over one hundred pills per day. The kinds of people snapping up his rejuvenating, immortality-bestowing olive oil…

of course it’s NFT bros.

[lizardsfromspace]

Fad diets are wild to read about bc every one takes extremely basic health advice, and then tacks on some absurdity to it. Try to exercise more, and also you can't ever eat sugar again or you'll die since sugar is a evil poison that is behind every kind of cancer

[river-taxbird]

SCAM ALERT: Cryptocurrency related but can affect trans people buying HRT. I was probably 10 seconds away from having money stolen and I know what I'm doing. (Crypto Clipper)

Today I was helping a trans friend order some DIY HRT. A lot of DIY HRT places only accept cryptocurrency for security reasons. I am not looking to promote cryptocurrency or anything associated with it, but if you may be forced to use it for HRT or other reasons, you need to know this.

In general if you are forced to use crypto, you should use the cheapest coin your supplier will accept. If it is cheap, that means there is not a lot of activity on the chain and energy use will be less. I used one called Zcash as it was the cheapest one the site accepted but that's not really relevant.

I used an old coinbase account I had used for similar situations in the past. I was doing it on her PC. I got the instructions to pay on the HRT site, and I pasted the wallet address into Coinbase and just before I hit send I noticed the wallet address I had pasted didn't match the wallet address I had copied.

I looked it up and found this is from a form of malware called a Crypto Clipper, that detects when you have copied a crypto address, and makes you paste a different one so it can steal your money. I am lucky I noticed. To remedy it, I installed the free trial of Malwarebytes on her PC to remove malware, and completed the crypto transaction on my PC, and confirmed that the wallet address matched what the HRT site had given me.

I managed to avoid falling for it but it's such an easy thing to fall for, especially if you have avoided crypto thus far for extremely understandable reasons. Be careful out there! It could happen to anyone.

[copperbadge]

OoooOOOOOHHH one of my colleagues just got an email that looks sketchy as hell. It was awkwardly worded, vague on detail, and wanted our wire transfer information and tax ID so that he could make a donation in honor of a deceased family member. Colleague passed it on to one of my gift officers who passed it on to me like “Can you confirm this improbably named dead person existed?” and I could not confirm the existence of either the deceased or the supposed family member who contacted us. 

You can’t actually do much scamming with a wire transfer number and tax ID (the latter is publicly posted on our website) so I sent him my research with a note that I thought this was a “refund scam”: the scammer acts as a legit donor but immediately after making a wire transfer, he contacts the nonprofit to say he entered the wrong amount and asks to be refunded the overage -- crucially, to a different bank account. After sending the refund, the nonprofit discovers that the wire transfer was drawn on an empty bank account -- basically a bounced check -- but by then the scammer has also cleaned out the “refund” and bailed. (This is also pulled on individuals; never send the refund until the check has cleared, kids.) 

I suggested we ignore him, but if we want to test him we could ask for something a scammer couldn’t or wouldn’t want to provide, like a legit working phone number. My gift officer replied, “Sounds good. Do you want to take point?”

I messaged back, “By take point do you mean talk to this guy as a fundraiser?”

"You could be his gift officer!” he responded, and it’s at this point that I need you guys to understand I really like my gift officer but he is also the driest human I’ve ever met and it’s hard to tell when he’s joking. He knows that I have good customer service chops but I’m also quite shy and nervous about dealing with donors directly, so I thought he might be messing with me a little. 

But no! He continued, “If he’s a fraud you’ll catch it. If he’s legit, you know enough not to ruin a new donor relationship.”

I said, “Well, your faith in me is admirable,” and he’s not entirely wrong, so I accepted the challenge.  

And now I get to write the potential scammer an email about how we’re thrilled with the offer of a donation, we just need a few small pieces of information first, like a phone number and if possible a link to the obituary. If he plays along the next step is to inform him that we place a two-week hold on wire transfer donations and see if he still bites.