Scam e-mails

[A. E. Lowan]

Oh, it gets worse. The scammers who initiate and maintain close contact with their victims are predominately slave labor. Lots are located across SE Asia, which has a pretty tech-savvy population with high literacy rates. These poor bastards go into the cities looking for work, get nabbed, drugged, and beaten into submission and that's it. Probably the same organizations that run slave labor on shrimp trawlers.

 

[Naruzeldamaster]

And before we begin to think that scammers can only find us if we're published, that's not how it works. They're finding us in the Comments, especially on the larger pages and groups in our socials.

Trust me I know, this is why I (Barely) talk about my work online.
Here n maybe a couple discord messages, that's about it.
If Google Docs was ever hacked, I'd be cooked, but beyond that I've been super careful.
I'm like 99% sure I didn't talk about on social websites I barely use at all. Especially Facebook.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

Trust me I know, this is why I (Barely) talk about my work online.
Here n maybe a couple discord messages, that's about it.
If Google Docs was ever hacked, I'd be cooked, but beyond that I've been super careful.
I'm like 99% sure I didn't talk about on social websites I barely use at all. Especially Facebook.

I'm the Thing That Won't Shutup, but that's the business. Talkie and kittehs and making friends. Sometimes there's even books. There are people who I don't know, who know tghe names of all 8 of our animals and have deep feels about them. It low-key freaks me out.

 

[Naruzeldamaster]

I'm the Thing That Won't Shutup, but that's the business. Talkie and kittehs and making friends. Sometimes there's even books. There are people who I don't know, who know tghe names of all 8 of our animals and have deep feels about them. It low-key freaks me out.

Oh trust me, if someone's willing to 'bend an ear' and is genuinely (keyword) interested, I'll gladly spoil the whole plot.
But if it's some rando I don't know (It's different if I DO know them, but then they aren't a 'rando' anymore) on the internet. I'm kinda dodgy about sharing my work. Sometimes it's cause the server is a family friendly server but other times it's because I genuinely don't know the person.

As far as properly sharing the finished chapters, I'm extremely picky about who I toss a google docs link. (That privilege is reserved for folks here and a select few folks I'm proper close with on Discord) Despite my Discord profile saying 'give a shout if curious' it's not as simple as some random joe in discord saying 'hey so what kinda story is it' lol

 

[Mad Swede]

And before we begin to think that scammers can only find us if we're published, that's not how it works. They're finding us in the Comments, especially on the larger pages and groups in our socials.

They do indeed. Facebook, Instagram etc.

But I guess my main message would be that these scammers are intelligent, motivated and organised. They make money, otherwise they wouldn't keep at it, so they're motivated. They're intelligent, because they know how to set up AI tools, internet scrapers and e-mail systems, and because they know how to manipulate people into handing over money. And they're organised, because you need to be organised if you've 50 or more AI type bots scraping the net, sending out e-mails and starting the initial chts whilst you're reeling in the latest mark or five in the final stages of the con. Don't underestimate these scammers.