If you ever get a message like this, guys, block ‘em and move on. This has been a PSA.
What’s the scam here? Fake link to steal your account? They ask for you to donate to some post?
It doesn’t matter. There are a dozen reasons for people to do this and more spring up every day. Sometimes they want money, sometimes it’s a social engineering thing (making you paranoid so you’ll back them up on some random social issue), sometimes it’s a convoluted publicity scam, sometimes it’s just drama. It’s easier to ID them based on scammer tells than click the link, try to deduce their motive, and work backwards.
Tells to look for
1) “Not following each other”/ has been following you for a suspiciously short time
The majority of messages out of the blue you get should be from mutuals, or at least followers. Sometimes strangers will message you out of the blue – I’ve had people do this to ask questions about my stories or tell me they saw one of my posts on another site, for instance; these might be people who follow your work in other places but don’t want your posts on their dash, or they might want to ask you to clarify something they saw in one of your posts on someone else’s blog – but this is pretty rare, and they’ll tell you straight-up why they’re messaging. They very rarely send links, and if they do they’re exhaustively clear about what the link is, because everyone knows that scammers send random links. If you get a link from a stranger where the description is very vague or obviously designed to induce urgency, like this, it’s bait.
2) “I follow you on a different account”
This is an attempt to make 1) look less suspicious but it does the opposite. Why are you messaging me from this account? Why do you want to hide your identity from me? Again, there ARE some legitimate reasons to do this – I have anon messaging turned off, so anybody who had a good reason to stay anonymous and was desperate enough to contact me might make a dummy account from it. I’ve had baby gays in oppressive environments contact me this way. Abuse victims or people who otherwise need to be very careful about their identities might do this.
However, when they do so, it will be abundantly clear why they are doing it. Usually they’ll straight-up tell you, and it’ll also usually be clear from context. Why would you go anon to tell me I’m getting cancelled? That’s extremely suspicious. That’s scammer behaviour. If you follow me and you see this, either you wouldn’t care enough to tell me, or you’ll let me know you’re not a fresh scam account by identifying yourself.
3) Empty blog
Again, this CAN just be a legitimate person trying to be anon, but it’s a LOT of effort to do so. And even those legit people usually have *some* activity on their sideblog. A fresh blog like this, especially when connected to such a trivial message, screams “dead end phone”; that is, a blank communication base for running a scam that potential victims can’t immediately and easily connect to the scammer and ruin their reputation. Anyone messaging you from an empty blog can be assumed to be a scammer unless it’s immediately and abundantly clear that they have another reason for doing it.
4) “You’re getting cancelled…”
First; no, I’m not. If I were getting cancelled, I would definitely know about it. That’s kind of intrinsic to getting cancelled. It can’t happen secretly.
Second, strangers do not tell you this. A mutual who you have an existing friendship with might give you a heads-up if they see drama about you, but unless you’re a legitimately famous person (like Neil Gaiman or something), random people don’t say this in good faith. If I were getting cancelled and a stranger were going to contact me about it, it would be to ask clarifying questions about the claims being made. (Or hate mail, I guess.) “You’re getting cancelled” here is designed to induce a panic or defensive response, or at the very least curiosity… what could I have possibly said in my remark on that ebay post that could be racist? I just made a silly language joke about being nonbinary! I need to go and see how it was misinterpreted, and defend mysel –
And that’s the trap.
5) “… in the comments of this post”
You can’t get “cancelled” in the comments of a single post. Even if this was actually happening, that’s not what being cancelled is. They just want me to click the link.
I could find out why they wanted me to click the link by clicking the link. Maybe it’s for money, somehow. Maybe it’s a virus. Maybe it’s a bid for popularity, or drama, or social engineering. Maybe they’re just blanket testing people’s susceptibility to clicking random links so they can fish targets for a more labour-intensive scam later on.
This kind of curiosity, too, is a trap. The only winning move is not to click the fucking link. Block and move on.
I started asking my ex pcp (derogatory) “Are you unable to do [insert testing/referrals that would maybe help get me closer to a stronger treatment/recovery plan], or is it your personal preference to not initiate these options?” And applying it to other doctors/medical workers and
It gets them to shut the fuck up and do their job real quick, because they don’t want the problems of me going to the Daddy Admin, and bitching about their blatant refusal to help me.
Daniel Radcliffe for sure IS a vocal trans ally and that’s in and of itself a good reason to not want to be involved in anything to do with Harry Potter. He’s done a huge amount of advocacy work and fundraising to support LGBTQ youth for most of his public life, well before Rowling came out of the transphobia closet - this fucking matters to him.
but I also think it’s worth acknowledging that although he’s pretty positive and diplomatic about his experience with the Harry Potter series, he’s been extremely clear since the last film came out that he has no interest in coming back to the role, and while it’s a bit dodgy to speculate about people’s lives here, he’s talked about how he had a pretty severe alcoholism issue towards the back end of the films, as a coping mechanism for the scrutiny that he was under. He’s said that there are big chunks of the latter films where he’s visibly still drunk. I think it’s safe to assume that Harry Potter represents a time in his life he’s not necessarily keen to revisit, and that’s also a pretty reasonable thing imo.
Based on kibty’s current situation, it would appear it is not full of dark matter (which does not interact with normal matter in this way, if it exists at all). It seems far more likely that kibty is full of neutron star, which is far heavier and tastier to boot.
just in case anyone missed this in the news or maybe not in the loop, Disney is currently refusing to meet with or acknowledge the newly formed animation production workers union that just voted to join IASTE and become an official part of TAG, the animators and animation artists guild
production workers across all studios are currently voting to be recognized for their hard work and invaluable skill at keeping these productions running, but studios are refusing to meet with them to let them negotiate deals or even exist
as someone who works in animation as a designer i know i wouldn’t be able to do my job at all without any of my production workers. they are the incredibly hard working people who oversee pretty much everything in animation. they make sure everything is running on time, that schedules are being followed, they have to know pretty much every single word of the scripts and beats from the storyboards to make sure nothing is missed, and most importantly, they make sure artists are being taken care of and not overworked. they really are the unsung heroes of the animation world
production workers are also by far the most exploited workers in animation currently. they make about a fraction of what artists make for just as much work put in, and currently have no agreement for health coverage or other benefits that artists protected by the union are guaranteed
BUT! there is some good news. right now there’s a petition on IATSE’s website that has over 80,000 signatures currently addressed to disney leadership to do the right thing and meet with this new union and recognized their vote to form. it still needs roughly 21,000 signatures and only takes a minute to sign! anyone with a zip or postal code can sign, meaning both US and Canadian residents can sign and help this union get the deal it deserves!!
^ From a therapist-friend, in case any in-therapy-friends ever worry about this.
And this is because it would be really shit of them to open up your entire brain into hysterical Upset and then boot you out without helping you find equilibrium, but there is probably someone right after you. Just to fully articulate.
Yeah exactly. When I do therapy I always keep an eye on the clock so I know when I have enough time to keep opening up big issues, vs. when I have to work on getting them back to stable so they don’t leave my office and walk straight into a wall.
I really need people to understand that ADHD is not a moral failing. It’s a different brain structure. An ADHD brain physically LOOKS different, if you took a picture of my brain you could see that certain parts of my brain are smaller or bigger than average or that they are otherwise different. That isn’t something you can fix by “trying harder”. We can not stop having these symptoms no matter what we do, because we were born with brains that are completely incapable of working in a neurotypical way. This doesn’t mean that we’re broken or hopeless, we’re just different & if we have the right support we can live amazing lives! But we do need extra help. We are disabled. It’s not our fault, and there is nothing we can do, no matter how hard we try, to change the fact that we were born like this. It’s not a moral failing, it’s a disability and it needs to be taken seriously.
A day late, but posting a story of when we first got married to celebrate our anniversary:
The thing about having an autistic husband, is as much as I love him, he just is not capable of picking up on behaviors or facial expressions and knowing what they mean. He needs me to speak the words I’m feeling.
Early on, this was a problem. When I was exhausted after work and didn’t have the emotional energy to deal with anything, I needed some time alone.
I would say “I’m tired,” get up and leave a room.
He’d follow.
I would shut a door.
He would open it, and keep talking to me.
I had to actually speak the words, “I would like a little bit of space for a while.”
And then he would say, “Oh.” In a sad voice.
And then I’d feel like an asshole, because he always seemed so sad when I did that. I didn’t want to hurt him. I loved him, and I thought I was a bad wife for wanting time for myself. Things were not good.
One day, I came home, and on my desk was a card, laminated. It was simple, black text on white background, in 36-point font. It said:
I love you. Fuck off.
And he took my hands and said the reason he was sad wasn’t that I needed space— he needs his sometimes too, but I pick up the signals and leave him alone.
He felt bad that he couldn’t understand me, and I always looked so uncomfortable and guilty when I told him.
So now I have a card that I can hand to him, any time, and he will understand and go away for an hour and nobody feels guilty.
genuinely friendly reminder to never EVER share someone’s location/information without their explicit permission. you do not know why that person is asking, what they plan to do with that information, or even if the asker has that person’s best interest in mind at all.
OP is also not exaggerating how common this is. my abusive parents successfully kidnapped me from work once because a coworker who didn’t know my situation told them when my next shift was. my parents didn’t even know where I lived at that point in time, which was very much on purpose. it took me days to get away again. ALWAYS tell the person that is being looked for that someone is looking. never share personal information or even how to get in contact them. you can take information in and pass it along, but you absolutely cannot give any out.
[image descriptions: screencap of tweets from rahaeli @rahaeli 7/9/21.
Hello friends, your regular reminder that a not insignificant number of social media “missing person” efforts are actually someone’s abuser trying to get them back, especially with missing older teens. Please don’t share unofficial missing person flyers–
–and if you do spot/know the person in them, tell THAT PERSON someone is looking for them instead of providing any information to the person doing the looking.
I cannot tell you how many times I have seen a site wide “missing person” turn into the person writing in to ask us to enforce the restraining order, or the custodial parent begging us to shut down the non custodial parent’s attempted kidnapping
Every time I say this, someone says “but what if it’s real, better safe than sorry” and no, it absolutely is not. For a good while I got “this is my abuser, please make them stop” requests for 70-80% of the viral unofficial missing persons crossing my feed.
This number is obviously anecdata–I’ve never been able to find a peer reviewed study attempting to pin down prevalance. But based on those experiences, I absolutely advise never sharing one of those posts.
(I used to finish this PSA thread saying that if a missing person alert came from police or a federal agency, it had likely been screened for abusive tactics and was more likely to be real. I no longer say this.)
This should be your principle for any time someone wants you to connect them with someone else, btw. Never give someone’s info to the person who asked. Tell the asker you’ll give that third party THEIR contact info instead.
–and if you do spot/know the person in them, tell THAT PERSON someone is looking for them instead of providing any information to the person doing the looking.
I will probably be muting this in a bit, but some followup: for those questioning “just how often does this happen, even?”, I wasn’t keeping an exact count but I think we just hit double digits of people saying “this happened to me/a friend” in replies to QTs of this
As in, of the current 70 or so quote tweets, around 10% of them have a person telling a story about a time their abuser faked a social media post expressing concern over them as a missing/vulnerable person in order to continue abusing them.
It’s not rare. It’s not unusual. It is, in fact, vastly more common than *any* dangerous situation in which social media attention can do literally anything to improve the situation. (I’ve rarely seen a dangerous situation massive social media attention can improve, honestly.)
To the people who want to argue about this advice: I have, more than once, personally seen an abuser’s viral missing persons post end in suicide or homicide. I have never in 20 years seen a case of stranger kidnapping at all, much less one that’s resolved by virality.
All I’m asking you to understand is that the abusers who do this are very, very good at convincing you their “missing person” is irrational, in danger, or has diminished capacity. You will never be able to spot these situations by reading over a single post. Ever.
If you want to retweet missing personsviral alerts because you want to do good in the world, please understand that there is a much, much greater statistical chance you are *actually* contributing to making things much worse for the person instead. Please just think about that.
And to answer the “well why are you qualified to say this”, since this has gotten way out of my usual circles: hi, I’ve been working trust and safety/ToS on social media for 20 years now. I am never, ever the person with the worst stories when I go out drinking with others.
/end id]
If you’re doubting this the thing you have to remember is that stranger kidnapping is very rare, for either children or adults. The vast majority of the time, when someone is kidnapped or held against their will, it’s by someone they already know, someone close to them: a parent, a partner, that sort of thing. So if someone has been kidnapped or whatever, the people closest to them (who are usually the ones to put up missing posters and whatnot) should be the first suspects, not the last. It’s possible that the person putting up the missing person fliers is the parent who has custody and the noncustodial parent kidnapped the kids … but it’s just as possible that the person putting up fliers is the noncustodial parent who is doing this as part of a plot to find the kids so they can kidnap them. You can’t tell which is which just from seeing the flyer.
And when people choose to leave voluntarily and cut all contact with people close to them, they don’t just do it on a whim. There’s pretty much always a reason. For example, the people they’re cutting contact with might be shitty and abusive. Now, the reason might also be “the person leaving is messed up by drugs” or whatnot, or “they’re being forced by an abuser to cut contact.” Those are also reasons. Buta lot of people who cut contact with someone in their life do it for very good and valid reasons. You can’t tell which is which just from seeing the flyer.
rb this version with image descriptions please
remember this especially now with so many trans and gay people fleeing states that are passing anti lgbtq laws
i guarantee there’s going to be homophobic families saying their “mentally disturbed family member” is missing
