estirose

I had a comment earlier today on my newest fic. The comment was very generic, complimenting my narrative skills and asking about how long I'd been writing. I thought it was sus, but if it was an artist scam it was easy enough to get to the "ooh, I'd love to create art/a comic (if you pay me, of course)" part and then do a standard report to AO3 abuse. I also pointed them at my profile, which says how long I've been writing (and also that soliciting is against AO3 TOS).

Well, they kept hammering on and on about me publishing even though I basically told them I'm an old fart who writes fanfic for fun with no interest in publishing. I then asked how many of my 600+ fics they'd read.

They'd read two. One in Stardew Valley and one in Fantasy Life i (the fic we were having the conversation on). Strangely, they didn't hit the other Fantasy Life i fic I'd written, and they reiterated that just from reading 2 fics that they knew I'd be an awesome published author.

(To be honest, younger me would have jumped at the chance, but given the nightmare that is publishing - and the fact that a family member of mine used a vanity press and I remember how much they were ripped off - I have no interest in it myself. The nearest I've ever come to publishing is getting a copy of each of my Original Work NaNoWriMo stories, and that was one copy for myself.)

In case they were just an awkward commenter - because I am an awkward commenter - I explained that their comments seemed sus, and if they genuinely meant well then sorry, I just have been hit by so many scammers that I'm naturally a bit skeptical.

And then they finally sprung what they were aiming for at me. "I’ve even helped [other writers] from formatting all the way to publishing." And also "If you’d like to know more, I’m happy to share everything with you." Which honestly seems to me to be soliciting paid work.

I very awkwardly asked them what part of the world they were in (so I didn't step on any toes). I think they finally caught on that I was onto them. I'd put in a web bug - a small, invisible graphic - in the middle of the conversation to see if I could record an IP address. And I saw 2 IP addresses, one of which I recognized as my own, and one that was 39.34.129.152. Since they're the only one besides me that was hitting the fic, I think they were/are in Karachi, Pakistan based on the Geographic IP lookups I checked.

Unfortunately for this person, I regularly follow scambaiting and scam education channels on YouTube as I have an interest in avoiding falling prey to scams, and I am very very aware of how much a hotbed for scams Pakistan is. Scams targeting writers is nothing new, but I hadn't encountered them on AO3 other than the artist scams, so of course I had to talk about this here.

(I haven't reported them yet. I'll give them some time to further dig their own graves. Regardless of whether they come back or not, I'll report them tomorrow.)

ETA: They replied with "Well, I and my company belong to Harrisonville, Missouri; it's a state of the USA. We are a registered company within the US, and wby?" Note that no American would "belong to" a city or town, and would not need to tell an American that Missouri is a state. Also, commercial solicitation much?

The red flags for me:
1. They were awfully persistent about me writing books.
2. They'd only hit one of the two Fantasy Life i fics - and given that they're both late-game set stories I think it would be reasonable that someone interested in my writing would read both.
3. Also, I have a bunch of Stardew Valley fics. Why stop at one if you were genuinely interested in the kind of stories I write? (And it's also curious that it's my most popular Stardew Valley fic. It's like someone just clicked into my Stardew Valley works and selected the most popular story or something.)
4. Personally, I wouldn't be asking someone to get into writing/publishing lengthy fiction if all I'd read of their stuff was a total of 1500 words over 2 stories. At best you could tell that I might write pretty good short stories, but not a novel. There are tons of differences between the two formats and while some people are successful at both, not everybody is. (Safe to say the novel/longer story format is not my favorite; I only have 28 fics above 10,000 words and several of those are compilations of other fics.)