Bots, and scammers, and spammers – Oh My!
Spend any time on the internet and it won’t be long before you come across the oh so joyous litany of people trying to take advantage of others. They come in the form of stolen images and fake names. In the guise of “helping” and being some “special deal”. Once upon a time they existed as “snake oil” salespeople going door to door. Then they “graduated” into chain letters that swore if you didn’t send them along you’d reap years of bad luck or even death! Then came the digital boon and they adapted. Still the same dumb chain mail schemes with the added flare of new royal friends from Nigeria. Social media is birthed and suddenly the posts spew of “If you don’t share X then Facebook is gonna do bad things to your stuff!” fear mongered on and on.
Now they’re wherever a comment section exists, no matter what media platform, with even dating sites having to warn their users to beware of grifters! It honestly gets ridiculous. It is the era of cynicism for survival’s sake! Truly the only method of avoiding them, or at least not as many of them, is by having as minimal contact with the internet as possible.
The problem? I can’t hide away anymore. The majority of us who are trying to build up our creative careers can’t. There is a level of necessity in having an “internet presence” in order to fight through a veritable sea of options for the rare moment of discoverability. And it really only grows more dependent on us developing some variance of connections with a world of strangers to break through the corporate haze that has invaded spaces and used their monetary power to force people into content creation wars in order to not be buried. Because at the end of the day, almost anything can be bought and sold, especially the power hungry’s integrity.
The speed of adaptability within the scammer’s schemes is pretty crazy. Just three years ago I began the social media aspect of my author journey. In that time I slowly started to implement the use of hashtags on my Instagram posts in order to try and reach a wider audience. The problem was that any time I used them I spent half of my time deleting comments and blocking accounts from all of the “SEO experts” who “saw your content and think it deserves more attention than it’s getting!” It doesn’t take long before these messages and comments send you racing to the settings section to block all words and variants of “promo”/”promote this”.
Within that three year period I finally gave in and just stopped using hashtags altogether.
Except not even that seems to matter any more.
About a month ago (as of writing this) I hosted a live video on my Facebook page just discussing my book and the upcoming Kickstarter for it. Absolutely zero hashtags were implemented. But oh my goodness gracious did the scam messages come out in droves. The funny thing? About half of them were in straight Chinese with the same profile pictures with all different names. The other half of them that were actually in English were all complaining about how products they bought from my shop were faulty and they had attached an image of said product to “prove” it.
Guys… I don’t have a shop set up yet. I’m still in the process of building one here to be sure. But as of the 30-ish messages I got that month, I wasn’t selling anything. Which I have to admit gave me a bit of a laugh at the stupidity of it.
My response to the majority of these messages is to just straight mark them as spam and report them without engaging with them at all. Very few of these scams are straight people behind the messages, many are just a litany of bots sent out to try to see who they can sink their hooks into. So, as to not try and help train their tech on natural human conversation and interactions, I just boot them away.
Though just recently, I had one that I couldn’t help myself but to poke at. I had just completed making a post announcing my excitement that the preparations for my Kickstarter were coming together. Aside from real human engagement, I started getting so many random comments saying “X account helped me get my information back! If you use them maybe they can help you restore your account!” – So now the spam bots are just posting whatever, not even anything connected to what the post is about. Block, report, delete.
Then came the Facebook messages to my business page. Now I want to reiterate, I had not actually started my Kickstarter campaign at this point. That meant there was no page to see for it, not video ad for it, no link for people to follow and see the page. I soon received a message about said Kickstarter, and this one time I felt like playing around a bit. (If you follow my Facebook page you have likely already seen this image)
Block, report, delete.
I don’t have an answer or even idea as to how to cull these things better. Though I will say that some sites are much better at taking these things out than others have been. But I will prefer these over the indecent messages I will get from men on my business page. Why they think that’s the place to try and find their latest hookup I will never understand.
I don’t really have any great “deeper message” in all of this. Really just more so venting for venting’s sake. Though I will again go on the record and say that I will never message any of my social media followers to ask for their financial information. Even when it comes to finally getting my online store up, all financial information input will take place in that space and not beyond.
Stay wary my friends, and may your encounters with the scammers be more places of ridiculous hilarity and not successful destruction. ❤