hirup ngan saukur ngumbara

⚔️x🥗👒 Egghead

( Gank 🪙 past -feb- reward )

its the final warm day before rainy season so i took Bepo (and myself) for a long bike ride

I’ve just been feeling like this

Cheese!

First kiss💘

⚔️👒💚❤️

their son is Based on 'The Boy Who Rode A Dragon' early prototype of Oda involving a young boy and a dragon.

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.

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!

I have seen many a post saying things along the line of "I would rather give to a hundred scams on the chance that some of these people are real and need my help" but I cannot stress enough that the danger of giving to a scam is not just "oh no i gave money to someone that didn't actually need it."

Scams can and will take your card/bank info/identity/whatever if they have a chance at it. Not every scam. But folks have got to be more cautious and treat this as a serious risk.

I had been donating to a lot of vetted fundraisers when my card information was stolen. I got an unauthorized purchase on my card, and luckily, my bank caught it and froze my card. I had to cancel it and get a new card. I had already been checking every single fundraiser and only donating to vetted ones, and my information still got stolen, and it was very likely stolen by a bot.

I'm now getting an amount of fundraiser asks in my inbox that I can't keep up with, and a lot of them are very obvious scams, and some of them are likely legitimate, but there are so many that I can't keep up.

The problem isn't that you may donate $5 to someone who doesn't need it. The problem is that if you donate $5 to a scam bot and that bot takes your card information and the scammer drains your bank account, then you have a drained bank account. It isn't selfish or racist to be careful with your information. It's proactive. If your account is drained, you can't donate $5 to ANYONE. I am very lucky that no money was taken from my account and I was able to get a new card. Not everyone is that lucky. Protect your information. Donate to verified sources.

Also not to put too fine a point on it, but that bit about the online scamming industry relying heavily on the use of human trafficking victims in very real and very serious.

I think a lot of the logic of "give recklessly!" comes from there being pretty hard limits on what an irl scam can consist of. Let's say I'm at the grocery store, and the woman in front of me can't pay for her groceries, oh no, and she's got her arm in a sling, and it's her five year old daughter's birthday too, and she starts crying as she's putting the items back one-handed... I think most people wouldn't give a shit if maybe that woman was scamming us. I think most of us, assuming we could, would pull out our wallet and tell her not to worry, it's really no problem, and buy the boxed cake mix and the toilet paper and the whatever else for her.

But... what's the worst thing that can happen in that situation, really? The worst possible outcome is "I bought <$100 worth of ordinary groceries for a woman who was actually a scam artist". That's a risk worth taking for the people who are really in need, right? That's a totally reasonable trade off.

I'm at no risk of getting my personal information via a gofundme lookalike password harvester. I'm not even really at much risk of getting my credit card number stolen, unless the checkout clerk is in on the scam, which is pretty unlikely.

More than that, you know what there is absolutely zero risk of at all? There is no risk that if I pay for this woman's groceries, those groceries will be used to directly fund and maintain a massive human trafficking operation in Myanmar. There is no risk that, by paying for her groceries, my name will be placed on a list of marks, and I will then be accosted by dozens upon dozens of human trafficking victims who are all being forced to enact "sad mother tearfully putting back groceries" scams, as well as vehicular scams, romance scams, extortion scams, and more, literally at gunpoint. I'm not going to "do good recklessly" at the supermarket, and then as a direct result of that, have my next six coffee dates all turn out to be people who were lured to a foreign country with the promise of a good job, had their passport stolen, and are being kept in a warehouse with limited access to food, water, and basic hygiene – who have been threatened that unless they can go on hundreds of coffee dates a day and convince at least a dozen of those people to pour money into a crypto scam, their captors will make the hell that they are living even worse.

If any of that was a realistic possibility in the case of an irl grocery store sob story, don't you think we'd all be a little less likely to reach for our wallets?

"Do good recklessly" does not mean "it's fine to recklessly give money to anyone who says they need it, even if there are very good reasons to suspect that a huge amount of that money is going directly to a literal human trafficking ring".

Please please please give to real charities instead of random fundraising asks you receive online. If you can't be convinced to do it for the sake of not getting scammed, then do it for the sake of not wanting to participate in genuinely horrific abuse. Every dollar you send to a scammer who is using the stolen identity of a vetted Palestinian in need? It doesn't just get pocketed; it also very likely goes to support this:

⚔️👒💚❤️

their son is Based on 'The Boy Who Rode A Dragon' early prototype of Oda involving a young boy and a dragon.

Ooughhh

I think my favorite thing about zolu is that not only is it peak moron4moron, but like

Zoro and Luffy are each convinced that they have the braincell in the relationship. Luffy is like “aw Zoro it’s okay that youre stupid :)” and zoro says “I don’t wanna hear that from you” and they’re both resigned to being moronsexual meanwhile everyone else is watching Luffy just say the most batshit things that cross his mind and Zoro try to will away blood loss and they think “they’re made for each other”

hey zolu kings, i see you and i just want you to know im still there.

maybe i’ll finish it later

thinkin about Zoro’s sacrifice