It doesn’t matter. There are a dozen reasons for people to do this and more spring up every day. Sometimes they want money, sometimes it’s a social engineering thing (making you paranoid so you’ll back them up on some random social issue), sometimes it’s a convoluted publicity scam, sometimes it’s just drama. It’s easier to ID them based on scammer tells than click the link, try to deduce their motive, and work backwards.
Tells to look for
1) “Not following each other”/ has been following you for a suspiciously short time
The majority of messages out of the blue you get should be from mutuals, or at least followers. Sometimes strangers will message you out of the blue – I’ve had people do this to ask questions about my stories or tell me they saw one of my posts on another site, for instance; these might be people who follow your work in other places but don’t want your posts on their dash, or they might want to ask you to clarify something they saw in one of your posts on someone else’s blog – but this is pretty rare, and they’ll tell you straight-up why they’re messaging. They very rarely send links, and if they do they’re exhaustively clear about what the link is, because everyone knows that scammers send random links. If you get a link from a stranger where the description is very vague or obviously designed to induce urgency, like this, it’s bait.
2) “I follow you on a different account”
This is an attempt to make 1) look less suspicious but it does the opposite. Why are you messaging me from this account? Why do you want to hide your identity from me? Again, there ARE some legitimate reasons to do this – I have anon messaging turned off, so anybody who had a good reason to stay anonymous and was desperate enough to contact me might make a dummy account from it. I’ve had baby gays in oppressive environments contact me this way. Abuse victims or people who otherwise need to be very careful about their identities might do this.
However, when they do so, it will be abundantly clear why they are doing it. Usually they’ll straight-up tell you, and it’ll also usually be clear from context. Why would you go anon to tell me I’m getting cancelled? That’s extremely suspicious. That’s scammer behaviour. If you follow me and you see this, either you wouldn’t care enough to tell me, or you’ll let me know you’re not a fresh scam account by identifying yourself.
Again, this CAN just be a legitimate person trying to be anon, but it’s a LOT of effort to do so. And even those legit people usually have *some* activity on their sideblog. A fresh blog like this, especially when connected to such a trivial message, screams “dead end phone”; that is, a blank communication base for running a scam that potential victims can’t immediately and easily connect to the scammer and ruin their reputation. Anyone messaging you from an empty blog can be assumed to be a scammer unless it’s immediately and abundantly clear that they have another reason for doing it.
4) “You’re getting cancelled…”
First; no, I’m not. If I were getting cancelled, I would definitely know about it. That’s kind of intrinsic to getting cancelled. It can’t happen secretly.
Second, strangers do not tell you this. A mutual who you have an existing friendship with might give you a heads-up if they see drama about you, but unless you’re a legitimately famous person (like Neil Gaiman or something), random people don’t say this in good faith. If I were getting cancelled and a stranger were going to contact me about it, it would be to ask clarifying questions about the claims being made. (Or hate mail, I guess.) “You’re getting cancelled” here is designed to induce a panic or defensive response, or at the very least curiosity… what could I have possibly said in my remark on that ebay post that could be racist? I just made a silly language joke about being nonbinary! I need to go and see how it was misinterpreted, and defend mysel –
5) “… in the comments of this post”
You can’t get “cancelled” in the comments of a single post. Even if this was actually happening, that’s not what being cancelled is. They just want me to click the link.
I could find out why they wanted me to click the link by clicking the link. Maybe it’s for money, somehow. Maybe it’s a virus. Maybe it’s a bid for popularity, or drama, or social engineering. Maybe they’re just blanket testing people’s susceptibility to clicking random links so they can fish targets for a more labour-intensive scam later on.
This kind of curiosity, too, is a trap. The only winning move is not to click the fucking link. Block and move on.
