Fuck it this is mainly an OPM blog now

You're being targeted by one of the cleverest scams going right now, and the reason it works is uncomfortable: the email genuinely came from PayPal.

The trick is in the subject line, not the email

When most people think "phishing email," they picture sketchy senders, broken English, and links to weird domains. This scam is the opposite. The email passes every authenticity check — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, all green. It comes from PayPal's actual mail servers. The fonts are right. The footer is right. The unsubscribe link works. If you forwarded it to a security expert and asked "is this really from PayPal?" they'd have to say yes.

So how is it a scam?

Scammers have figured out that PayPal lets anyone send small amounts of money to anyone else, and that PayPal will dutifully email the recipient a notification. The scammer sends you a payout of, say, one Hungarian forint — about a quarter of a cent. PayPal's system then automatically generates and sends you a real, legitimate, fully-authenticated email confirming the transaction.

Here's the catch: the email's subject line is whatever the scammer typed when they set up the payout. PayPal doesn't sanitize it. So they write something terrifying like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 — call this number with questions" and PayPal's servers cheerfully deliver that subject line straight to your inbox, wrapped in a perfectly legitimate-looking notification.

For anyone who hasn't seen them before, Hidden Search Operators are handy tricks you can use when you're either searching or filtering AO3.

summary: string is a generic way of explaining that you can search AO3 for a specific word that appears in a summary. You can do this from the search bar in the header, from the Any Field box at the top of the Advanced Search form, or from the Search Within Results box at the bottom of the filter menu.

Examples:

summary: Bruce

summary: "Bruce Banner"

summary: Bruce OR summary: Banner OR summary: Hulk

You need to put quotation marks around your search term if it is more than one word. The quotes make sure that the site searches for those two words together.

The other two operators listed work best in the Search Within Results box.

expected_number_of_chapters: 1 will return results where every fic has only 1 chapter currently posted.

You can use expected_number_of_chapters: -1 if you want results where every fic has more than 1 chapter currently posted.

I mean, there is a secret way to filter for primary ship if that's what you're looking for?

You need to install a userscript in your browser, so if you're a mobile user you'll want to use Firefox instead of Chrome (Chrome doesn't allow users to install scripts in the mobile version of the app).

The script is called AO3 Only Show Primary Pairing and what it does is filter out fics that don't have your indicated ship as the first (or only) relationship tagged.

If you've never installed a userscript before, click or tap on the ? in green next to where it says Install this script. That'll take you through the process of doing it for the first time.

The code itself is commented, so you should be able to to just drop your info into it. They give you an example ship in the relationship field and you can add in characters as well (or instead) if you prefer.

You can also adjust how many tags it looks at. Default, it just looks at the first 1 but if you want it to look at the first 2 or 3, you can just adjust the numbers.

Edit: also I just realized this is a branch of this post that doesn't have my correction. To remove oneshots, the syntax is actually

So here’s the forger family, in all their slightly disastrous holiday spirit.

decided to do up some chibi versions of the Introvert / Extrovert / Ambivert series!