Sooooo ummmmmmm this is something that's probably going to piss a lot of people off, but I feel like I really need to say it.
If you get a message from an account claiming to be a Palestinian fundraiser, it is a bot. It is a scam. You need to report & delete the message and encourage others to do the same.
I know because I get messages on this account DAILY. I have a very high follower count and I'm pretty active and I interact with my followers a lot, and apparently that all adds up to one big bot magnet.
Bots following and messaging this account was a MASSIVE problem before Tumblr fixed its new account policies. I used to spend literally hours blocking and reporting the hundreds of bots that I would get following me each day.
I learned a lot about bots and how to identify them. The easiest way is with no avatar, "untitled" in the blog description (BTW if your avatar is still set to default PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD change it because you run a substantial risk of being accidentally blocked & reported as a bot).
One of the dead give aways of a bot was what I call "word salad" names. Three seemingly random words strung together making no sense, always adjective, adjective or noun, noun. If you reported a lot of these bots, you'd notice the same words kept showing up.
Nowadays, I am bombarded with fundraiser requests and sometimes, they don't even bother to hide the fact that they're a bot. The avatar is default, the blog title is "untitled," and the blog name is a classic randomly-generated word salad.
However MOST of the requests I get come from at least semi-legit looking accounts. There are pictures, a name, a story. Never mind that I've gotten that message three times from different accounts.
Sometimes, they claim to be vetted, but the whole vetting system essentially adds up to "trust me bro." There is no way of guaranteeing that this account isn't just lying about being vetted, claiming to be vetted by a false person, or are using the identity of a real Palestinian to scam people.
Previously, I've seen a lot of people getting attacked for raising questions about these fundraisers and getting attacked for being racist or for harming Palestinian families in danger, like Tumblr isn't a website famous for its scams and the words "The Arkh Project" "All or Nothing" or "Miss Officer and Mr. Truffles" mean nothing to you.
I personally have been scammed by people claiming to be charities on Tumblr before, specifically, The Leelah Project which used the name of a trans teenager who died by suicide to swindle people out of their money.
Luckily, there are actual, respected charities out there you can give money to if you want to help the cause:
Palestinian Children's Relief Fund
Palestine Red Crescent Society
United Nations Relief Works Agency
Islamic Relief
World Central Kitchen
Médecins Sans Frontièrs
One of the hardest things to accept about the situation in Palestine is that realistically, there is very little that your average outsider can do to change it. However, these large, well-respected and trustworthy charities are out there doing the hard work to keep people alive, and should be where the donation money is going
These scam bots feed on people's naïvety and need to believe that they are making a difference, and even worse, feed on the fear that by ignoring them, it somehow makes you a racist doing direct harm to a refugee family, when in fact they are using the suffering of Palestinians to take away money from those in need.
As far as fundraisers that don't send out random asks for donations, I honestly don't know. You'll have to do the work yourself and approach with much caution.
Be careful out there.
another really heartbreaking aspect of this is if you give money to a homeless guy who lied to you, that dude still gets some money which he probably needs anyway. with these scambots the money is probably going to bot farms, which are nontrivially reliant on human trafficking.
Cyberfraud is considered human trafficking's newest form of exploitation, according to the global crime-fighting organization. Victims are l
it's not just a waste of your money, it's a payment to actual literal criminal organizations. donate to vetted charities.
If you feel powerless, and you just do something to feel less powerless, without actually making it be something that works, you're doing it about your feelings, not about the situation you're unhappy about.
There are a lot of people in the notes claiming it’s easy to just check a vetting blog, entirely missing that this post addresses how easy it is for those vetting systems to be taken advantage of (people can take the identity of a vetted person by these blogs very easily).
I honestly don’t know what to think in terms of if there are actual real people anywhere at all buried in my inbox, but considering the plethora of supposedly vetted people asking for money in my inbox in exactly the same way there were a plethora of “people” in my inbox with completely bare accounts and “dying pets” asking for money with the same verbiage as each other…
Tumblr has always been a place where scams are pretty rampant. Yes, Tumblr is also a social media website where people are posting their legitimate fundraisers, but that’s exactly why scams can run as rampant as they do here.
Because it’s easy to prey on people who are already tuned into an issue. And with this one in particular, when even this post has people screaming at OP about how supposedly racist they are for this post, people are taking their own feelings of helplessness and reckoning with the fact that they are privileged and feel like they’ve finally been presented with a low-effort way to help and are lashing out at the people who are claiming this low-effort “help” they’ve glommed onto is rife with scams with that guilt they were feeling from reckoning with privilege—“I’m doing a thing which helps me feel less racist in a world where I’m privileged, and so you making a post like this one and telling me I’m not being less racist is a threat to me not being racist; you must be the racist!”
Anyway. The takeaway from this post shouldn’t really be, “do or do not donate to tumblr fundraisers for anything,” and certainly shouldn’t be, “and so you’re saying we shouldn’t donate our money at all?” like so many people are jumping to.
No, the takeaway should be that you need to be extremely careful with where you’re giving your money. Make absolutely sure you know where it’s going. The easiest way to do that is to pass off that responsibility to charity organizations which are much more equipped to be able to get your money where it’s needed and much less likely to put your money toward disguised human trafficking.
amazing additions!
