Everyone can report profiles and I know that reports are checked daily and taken seriously. Some people put a ton of detail into their reports and it makes it really simple to cross reference and find bad actors (but less detailed reports are helpful too). So that’s already something that the community does every day. If you see a suspicious account, please report them.

Yeah, there are people who get upsold VPNs by their antivirus suite and don’t even know what they are or how to turn them off.

I will say that this is a great thread for discussion and I hope a lot of people participate and share ideas. From my point of view, I’ve only been a mod/admin here for a minute, but I’m floored by the amount of work that goes on every day with preemptive bans and then lots of detective work and rooting out scammers. There are multiple people working 7 days a week on it. But it’s playing whack a mole, there are constant bad actors. There are some great suggestions here to improve security, I hope the discussion continues.

Using the web defensively has to be a part of the equation, too. Maybe as a community we can all learn to have a more common sense approach to interacting with strangers online. That’s not just this site, it’s everywhere you go online. Don’t give strangers money or PII. Reverse image search pictures. If something seems off or contradictory, trust your instinct.

It’s like spam, even with all the spam filters in the world some is going to get through, so you have to be able to recognize it and trash the harmful stuff.

Anyways, just wanted to chime in and say thanks for the thread and to recognize the admin team who does a lot more behind the scenes than you can see from the outside.