Fluff. Angst. Smut. The three food groups.

looking to the past .

For example, these four are all the same, with only slight variation in #1:

(I actually have duplicates from some of the "self-identified" anons above.)

But these two anons share the same new stock phrases:

"days are heavy" / "days that feel impossibly heavy."

Not to put too fine a tin foil hat on it, but:

That is the kind of threat someone involved in these kinds of financial scams and the social engineering behind them *would* make! It's a threatening statement to the existence of my blog which usually means heightened fear/anxiety of the target, which makes people more likely to fall for a financial scam. Social shame and embarrassment are also heightened emotions! Bullying works! This would make an excellent social engineering counterpoint (if tugging on heartstrings doesn't work!) and might even be effective on many people!

Sure, you can search the supposed connected usernames those anons claimed and find out specifics that way — but not a single one of those screenshots I showed specifies what they're referring to! The IDENTICAL messages from four "different people" never actually mention what their "family's struggle" even is! There's zero fucking context in the space of those messages. They're all IDENTICAL. I literally cannot be committing denialism about anything specific because those asks don't actually say anything I could be denying. How does this person know that these anons aren't a recently impoverished Nigerian prince?

So now you're asking why don't I just click on the usernames and find out more details? Simple. Because they're fucking fraudsters who sent me the same message like, six times with 4 different usernames attached AS ANONS. Why as anons if they have their own blogs and could send the messages that way? SIMPLE AGAIN: because if they're not logged into the blog accounts, you could have whole teams of people copying and pasting these anon asks to various Tumblr users constantly, and you can probably just bypass the ask limits by changing VPNs or going incognito or something. This is a DEDICATED scam. Is it a bot? MAYBE! But that also would explain some of why it doesn't work *while logged in* to the blog accounts — because being anon probably makes it easier to focus on volume.

Falling for these isn't just an 'oopsy doopsy, you're out some money' sort of a thing. If you send money to obvious scammers and if you platform obvious scammers, you are very likely directly financially supporting modern day slavery. That's not an exaggeration, and I'm not being alarmist. Please read any of these articles on the subject if you don't believe me:

me: there'd better be some appropriately jaunty musical accompaniment...

me: *unmutes*