Me? Participate? How Unusual!

Scientists have long hypothesized that the high electrical charge of thunderstorms could produce an opposite charge in the ground that would discharge from the forest canopy. But this phenomenon, known as a corona, had never been observed on actual trees.  (Image credit: W. Brune; research credit: P. McFarland et al.; via SciAm)

Scammers and bots generally scrape popular tags on tumblr; the art tag is a favorite, and recently on the furry art tag as well. Tumblr has issues like AO3/Wattpad with the commission-related scams and rage-troll bots; we also have political bots, porn bots, and phishing bots. The best thing to do is to block bots that reply/like your posts (or try to follow you) or appear on posts you are looking at or are posting in tags you search; the general rule is if someone hasn't changed their avatar, added a little message to their blog or made an original post, they're most likely a bot - there are also bots pretending to be celebrities or well-known industry names or lottery winners, and you should also block those.

You may want to set your messaging preference (in blog settings) to "only blogs you follow can message"; it limits who can contact you via messages, but stops you from getting random bot messages. Having unknown blogs (friendly or not) send messages to the inbox or have to contact via post or @ you in a post allows for vetting.

Speaking of inbox vetting - classic inbox scams are for go-fund-mes attached to mutual aide requests (i.e. medicine for sick cat, medicine for the sender's family/themself). Generally, people are not going to contact you directly with mutual-aide requests. [This also includes being @ -ed in comments on posts].

I recommend searching tags "Tumblr Scam" or "Scam Alert" at least once every 2 weeks; other users are posting about new scams going on in the "latest" tab, and you can see old scams in the "top" tab. The current scams to worry about most are the "Please message me; I reported you on accident :(" and "account verification from fake tumblr staff".

There's also blogs dedicated specifically to highlighting known scams/scammers. This post is quite long, but very useful as it highlights the different scams.

If you yourself feel like reaching out to other people you are not a mutual with yet, take the Inigo Montoya approach - write one longer message explaining who you are, why are you contacting the person in the first place, and what is your goal for the interaction. Just get to the point.