🔄 Username change detected:
@Captain_wolfy ➡️ @Captain_slashy (6822351400)So, I’m not sure what to say. Thank you doesn’t feel exactly right. Congrats isn’t nailing it either.
I have mixed feelings about this milestone.
This is like a soup kitchen to me.
I wish we didn’t need this channel and I look forward to a day we can shut this down.
In the meantime, thank you all for submitting your reports. Thank you for helping to keep me, my friends, and my community safer. Thank you for your trust, your grace, and your time.
A special thanks to everyone on our internal team including
- @Sp1ic3ki77y
- @Julmara (moderation)
- @am3thy5t (moderation)
- @Tealy (moderation)
- @zekone (UX/documentation)
- @Boopkin (documentation)
Thank you to those fielding the FAST report triage. @PuckFennec in particular.
This sort of an effort wouldn’t be possible without a community behind it.
That said, I don’t think I individually know 2000 furries, and that means a lot of you have no idea who I am or why I’m doing this!
I wrote something up for a few groups a week or two ago. I’ll share it here.
I have mixed feelings about this milestone.
This is like a soup kitchen to me.
I wish we didn’t need this channel and I look forward to a day we can shut this down.
In the meantime, thank you all for submitting your reports. Thank you for helping to keep me, my friends, and my community safer. Thank you for your trust, your grace, and your time.
A special thanks to everyone on our internal team including
- @Sp1ic3ki77y
- @Julmara (moderation)
- @am3thy5t (moderation)
- @Tealy (moderation)
- @zekone (UX/documentation)
- @Boopkin (documentation)
Thank you to those fielding the FAST report triage. @PuckFennec in particular.
This sort of an effort wouldn’t be possible without a community behind it.
That said, I don’t think I individually know 2000 furries, and that means a lot of you have no idea who I am or why I’m doing this!
I wrote something up for a few groups a week or two ago. I’ll share it here.
1
Forwarded from Yumi 🏳️⚧️🏴☠️ -> DORE -> AFC -> PAW
Scammers in the fandom
Background
Hello! I’m Yumi and I founded @scamtracking
Furry wise, I’ve been around since at least 2007. This is my community, I grew up with y’all.
I come from a lifelong background in cybersecurity with previous work centering around online payment processor fraud and brand security.
In recent years I saw a sharp rise in fake accounts pushing sugar daddy scams, room scams, suit scams, and more. Two of my friends fell victim to rooms scams and I saw countless others in the community fell victim to others.
Around 2017 I built some bots and tooling to help out the adult event space prevent stalkers, predators, and scrapers.
Over the years some of that tech made its way into a couple of more general groups to block spam bots.
As the scammers flooded the platform I saw the technology could detect them and track them.
I started up a channel tracking these users, which drew a community and eventually a team.
We studied what was happening, looked at logs from before and after the floods, improved our tooling, and started networking to get a better picture of what was going on.
What happened?
At some point during 2019-2021 a few people in Lagos Nigeria seem to have tested the waters narrowing their usual scam targets from general Americans to furry Americans.
They had some success, the community wasn’t really prepped for it. A little bit of money goes a long way there, so their friends asked how they did it, and were then shown the scam routine.
By 2022 the situation had changed. The scams started to migrate from the city center of Lagos onto the borders of the neighboring states near Lagos. Areas with active militia and conflict issues.
Talking to people more experienced in the fraud in that region we believe the success of the scam by regular scammers in Lagos was picked up by nearby organized crime groups that are helping fund the militias in exchange for protection.
Furry is just one scamming route of many for them and they have much more experience.
Using that experience the dollar value targets and complexity of the scam went up.
The old group would stick to simple stuff. Trying to get you to send them money as a ‘trust test’ before you could be their sugar baby. Pretending to sell something they didn’t have. Saying their cat was sick.
This new group has more people, and the scam has layers.
How does it usually work?
They have people that make ‘art’ and are often posing as artists.
They try to get commissions and may even deliver. Usually done with a combination of ai and a tech called vector tracing to automatically make sketch stages. Sometimes you’ll get a trace over of someone else’s art. Sometimes but rarely done with a real artist (they charge an arm and a leg so we think this is outsourced).
The commissions racket is just the lowest tier. They do it to figure out who has money, what their interests are, and even get personal details depending on the payment method.
Once they know you have money and are worth going after they will shift to other phases of the scam.
They have
Said they do art for fun and make their money in crypto, leading to a furry trusting them and losing $20k usd to an investment scam
Started to date commissioners and lied about their location, prepping them to pay the scammer for an expensive airline ticket.
Blackmailed users (wish I had more info but the user would only say they didn’t pay and went to the police)
Attempted to sell con rooms at expensive hotels after the user feels they can trust them.
As well as longer term milking scams like constantly having problems with their animals needing hundreds every month.
After completing their scam they have then used alt accounts to
Harass and gaslight the user publicly in chats, accusing the user of being the actual scammer and trying to get them booted and ostracized
Pretend to be another party that can recover their money, they just need their banking details or money up front to investigate
Or just continue to insist “the market wasn’t good and they should invest again”
Background
Hello! I’m Yumi and I founded @scamtracking
Furry wise, I’ve been around since at least 2007. This is my community, I grew up with y’all.
I come from a lifelong background in cybersecurity with previous work centering around online payment processor fraud and brand security.
In recent years I saw a sharp rise in fake accounts pushing sugar daddy scams, room scams, suit scams, and more. Two of my friends fell victim to rooms scams and I saw countless others in the community fell victim to others.
Around 2017 I built some bots and tooling to help out the adult event space prevent stalkers, predators, and scrapers.
Over the years some of that tech made its way into a couple of more general groups to block spam bots.
As the scammers flooded the platform I saw the technology could detect them and track them.
I started up a channel tracking these users, which drew a community and eventually a team.
We studied what was happening, looked at logs from before and after the floods, improved our tooling, and started networking to get a better picture of what was going on.
What happened?
At some point during 2019-2021 a few people in Lagos Nigeria seem to have tested the waters narrowing their usual scam targets from general Americans to furry Americans.
They had some success, the community wasn’t really prepped for it. A little bit of money goes a long way there, so their friends asked how they did it, and were then shown the scam routine.
By 2022 the situation had changed. The scams started to migrate from the city center of Lagos onto the borders of the neighboring states near Lagos. Areas with active militia and conflict issues.
Talking to people more experienced in the fraud in that region we believe the success of the scam by regular scammers in Lagos was picked up by nearby organized crime groups that are helping fund the militias in exchange for protection.
Furry is just one scamming route of many for them and they have much more experience.
Using that experience the dollar value targets and complexity of the scam went up.
The old group would stick to simple stuff. Trying to get you to send them money as a ‘trust test’ before you could be their sugar baby. Pretending to sell something they didn’t have. Saying their cat was sick.
This new group has more people, and the scam has layers.
How does it usually work?
They have people that make ‘art’ and are often posing as artists.
They try to get commissions and may even deliver. Usually done with a combination of ai and a tech called vector tracing to automatically make sketch stages. Sometimes you’ll get a trace over of someone else’s art. Sometimes but rarely done with a real artist (they charge an arm and a leg so we think this is outsourced).
The commissions racket is just the lowest tier. They do it to figure out who has money, what their interests are, and even get personal details depending on the payment method.
Once they know you have money and are worth going after they will shift to other phases of the scam.
They have
Said they do art for fun and make their money in crypto, leading to a furry trusting them and losing $20k usd to an investment scam
Started to date commissioners and lied about their location, prepping them to pay the scammer for an expensive airline ticket.
Blackmailed users (wish I had more info but the user would only say they didn’t pay and went to the police)
Attempted to sell con rooms at expensive hotels after the user feels they can trust them.
As well as longer term milking scams like constantly having problems with their animals needing hundreds every month.
After completing their scam they have then used alt accounts to
Harass and gaslight the user publicly in chats, accusing the user of being the actual scammer and trying to get them booted and ostracized
Pretend to be another party that can recover their money, they just need their banking details or money up front to investigate
Or just continue to insist “the market wasn’t good and they should invest again”
Forwarded from Yumi 🏳️⚧️🏴☠️ -> DORE -> AFC -> PAW
Where are we at now?
Given the success they have seen they put a lot of resources into growing a network of accounts.
Currently there are nearly 600 accounts we are tracking, with the overwhelming majority (~95%) believed to be associated with this series of fraud rings.
They appear to have specialists make the accounts, age them, and then hand the device off to an operator.
These scams go to funding real violence in Nigeria from what we understand.
I ask you to be aware of these scams and the larger ongoing battle with these fraud rings.
What we offer to help
We offer a public list as well as a bot to help fight this issue. We also have an api endpoint if you’d like automation with more control.
We are committed to only ever listing scammers. I’ve been here for ages, I’ll be here for ages. This is my community.
Listing anyone other than scammers would mean people trust the list less, and that means more people fall victim. It’s not something I take lightly.
If you see anyone on the list you think is a mistake please reach out or post in their listing so we can do a double check.
We used to have a 2% error rate with a median time to correct of 2 hours, but since upgrading the bot to limit human error there’s not been a removal in over 100 entries.
Our community has a lot of people watching the list, so when we add someone people know we usually get a ping. That’s what was keeping our correction time so low before.
Our main website is
https://scamtracking.org
We have some more info on the bot as well as the api here
https://scamtracking.org/countersignbot
The main channel to see when someone new is added is here
@scamtracking
The pinned message is where you should start.
Every listed account should have a link to their entry in the listings chat with more info.
We can’t always release all of the info that flagged someone as a scammer for us publicly though. The fraud ring bosses unfortunately are smart enough to watch our channel for tips on how to improve.
If we think the information could be used by scammers to avoid detection next time we will tend to keep it to the internal team and just release what we can.
We do have a discussion group where you can sometimes get a touch more info, as well as discuss the ongoing situation.
@ScamTrackingGroup
You can also request more info in the listing or dm an admin, sometimes we can share more 1:1 since we can tell ya aren’t a scammer.
If you want to submit new scammers or you want an easy way to look up an account to see if it’s listed you can use
@Scamtracking_submissions_bot
Given the success they have seen they put a lot of resources into growing a network of accounts.
Currently there are nearly 600 accounts we are tracking, with the overwhelming majority (~95%) believed to be associated with this series of fraud rings.
They appear to have specialists make the accounts, age them, and then hand the device off to an operator.
These scams go to funding real violence in Nigeria from what we understand.
I ask you to be aware of these scams and the larger ongoing battle with these fraud rings.
What we offer to help
We offer a public list as well as a bot to help fight this issue. We also have an api endpoint if you’d like automation with more control.
We are committed to only ever listing scammers. I’ve been here for ages, I’ll be here for ages. This is my community.
Listing anyone other than scammers would mean people trust the list less, and that means more people fall victim. It’s not something I take lightly.
If you see anyone on the list you think is a mistake please reach out or post in their listing so we can do a double check.
We used to have a 2% error rate with a median time to correct of 2 hours, but since upgrading the bot to limit human error there’s not been a removal in over 100 entries.
Our community has a lot of people watching the list, so when we add someone people know we usually get a ping. That’s what was keeping our correction time so low before.
Our main website is
https://scamtracking.org
We have some more info on the bot as well as the api here
https://scamtracking.org/countersignbot
The main channel to see when someone new is added is here
@scamtracking
The pinned message is where you should start.
Every listed account should have a link to their entry in the listings chat with more info.
We can’t always release all of the info that flagged someone as a scammer for us publicly though. The fraud ring bosses unfortunately are smart enough to watch our channel for tips on how to improve.
If we think the information could be used by scammers to avoid detection next time we will tend to keep it to the internal team and just release what we can.
We do have a discussion group where you can sometimes get a touch more info, as well as discuss the ongoing situation.
@ScamTrackingGroup
You can also request more info in the listing or dm an admin, sometimes we can share more 1:1 since we can tell ya aren’t a scammer.
If you want to submit new scammers or you want an easy way to look up an account to see if it’s listed you can use
@Scamtracking_submissions_bot