Forums » Smalltalk » Spam & Scammers

I've noticed recently that these past few days, there has been a large number of scammers accessing RPR and providing spam like information about a website that could be a potential scam. I just want to warn everyone about them! The mods have been great at banning them immediately after the reports. Thank you, mods!

There are a few ways to notice who these scammers are; One is usually they provide information about a website on their profile, and most times, they would post in the Smalltalk forum and post the same or similar information. I've been able to catch them almost immediately after they've made an account, luckily. I usually go onto the Community tab and scroll down to see who the newcomers on the website are. I recommend doing this also! I have already encountered three profiles like these in just a matter of hours.

Stay safe everyone, please do not press any links that are not familiar to you on these new profiles!

Thank you so much for the information! I didn't even notice, but now I will 100% be a bit more cautious

Thank you so much for all your hard work reporting bots! There certainly has been a lot of them recently, hasn't there They come in waves and we're getting a lot of them right now.

I recommend clicking Request Mod on the top of the post or on their user profile if you see one! If the bot has found its way into a group, please also provide a link to the spam post within the group - this is because group posts don't show up on the 'Recent Activity' section of your profile, so it can be a little hard for us to confirm their bot-identity without a direct link.

Some common warning signs are:
The user is brand new, and their first post or profile contains information unrelated to RPing and a suspicious link.
Sometimes the posts are in foreign languages, but they're still pretty easy to spot because they tend to be lengthy and contain links.
Sometimes bots talk to each other. Bot 1 will ask a question, and Bot 2 will answer with links. This is to make the 'responding' bot look more legitimate.
Sometimes bots make realistic posts using AI. They could seem to provide accurate answers, welcome newcomers, or mention characters and events in earlier posts in RP threads. They're really tricky and can be hard to spot. After these posts go undetected for a few days or weeks, they sneakily edit a link in!

Bots can have icons and characters (although the information on the character profile is usually either gibberish or an advertisement)

I recommend not clicking the links! Posting in spam threads is also not very useful and reporting is much better. This is because we get a big alert when something is reported but might not notice forum activity.

Yes, this. They have been perfecting this on an old board I used to be a part of that has been abandoned. Another sly trick is they quote someone's post and answer it, seeming legitimate, but they slip their link into the quoted person's post somewhere.

There has been a lot of this activity hitting some other sites, leading to them becoming inaccessible due to 'resource limit exceeded' errors. One site has the user activity details displayed at the bottom of the page, and there were over 2000 "guests" on the page. Sad.

Maybe we should ask Kim if it's possible to make a news thread about this? Some may not see this post, because they just returned, or they are active on other subforums, and stuff

I reported one a couple days back too. Haven't really come across more, though.

A news post about it would be great. That way, at least most of the users would be able to be more alert when interacting with new profiles that seem oddly suspicious. I only made this post as well so others can be aware, but if it's on Twitter (X) or, like you said, as a news post, it would help even more.