Spam Accounts PSA

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Written by: RebFar on TAL Discord (reposted here)

Hey friends! Your @BBEGs (Admins) and @Innkeeper (Moderator) are constantly evaluating and evolving our approach to keeping our community as safe as we can from spam/scam accounts, and we need your help maintaining our “better mousetraps!” Please take a second to review these notes to help safeguard TAL from suspicious activity:

How do I recognize a spam/scam account?

There is no 100% accurate formula, but the accounts tend to:

  • Choose usernames based on a single-English-first-name + a series of numbers or characters, with few or no other words
  • Use anime-style profile pic art
  • Have heavily-formatted “about me” entries on their profile, proclaiming love of art, music, poetry and/or romantic ideals, and including ASCII emojis and non-standard fonts.
  • Share no mutual servers with you outside of TAL
  • Have a creation date that is EITHER very recent (factory-farming new usernames) OR very old (gaining control of/compromising inactive existing accounts)
  • Join all at once in a flurry, with multiple new joiners within just a few minutes of each other.
  • Have joined TAL relatively recently, and have sent no messages and opted-in to no self-assign roles in the server during that period.

What do they do?

Scam accounts usually operate in one of two ways:

  • Immediately begin spamming direct-messages with generic “hey” or “hello” messages that eventually lead to a request to take art commissions or review their work, after a conversation has been established.
    • We don’t see them posting directly in the server much anymore (like in ⁠🖼the-art-gallery), presumably because it’s easier for admin to protect the community from scams in our own channels.
  • Lurk for a number of days, weeks, or months, presumably to blend into the server better, before beginning the direct-message spamming.

How should I respond?

  • PLEASE DO NOT CLICK THE “WAVE TO SAY HI” BUTTON IN ⁠🍻tavern-generalchat UNLESS YOU ARE REASONABLY SURE THE USER IS NOT A SPAM ACCOUNT . When a scammer is pinged like this, it signals to them that TAL’s space is a juicy target for users who will interact with their spam content.
    • You are probably always safe to send the vibrating peach to someone like big_d20roller75 with a skull PFP, but should probably ignore someone like aliciaa.3857_ with an anime PFP.
    • If you want to be friendly but aren’t sure if the new user is a scammer or a legit cool person, send a generic “Welcome to TAL” sticker without pinging the user via a reply, like you often see JmanX doing.
  • If you are EVER cold-called in direct messages by a TAL user you don’t know, they are guaranteed to be a suspicious account. Send screenshots to whatever @BBEGs (Admins) or @Innkeeper (Moderator) is currently online so we can ban and add that account’s characteristics to our knowledge base of scammers’ current tactics.
    • After you’ve sent your receipts to TAL staff, make sure to click the red “Report Spam” button in the top of the direct message window.