With the changing environment surrounding Scammer.info, one of the things I wish to tackle and improve upon is the quality of new posts.
As it currently stands, I have given staff their own “guidelines” on when to approve or deny a post that is in our queue, but to summarize that easily for everyone
To be Approved
The post must be unique,
the post must contain direct evidence of any claim (such as screenshots, links, numbers, emails, and voicemails)
the post must be related to a category on this website,
the post must not provide any information about an unrelated and/or innocent party.
To be Denied
The post is a duplicate/information already present on the site,
the post fails to adequately prove the claims being made,
the post fails to censor/not include personal information of an unrelated and/or innocent party,
all information given is dead on arrival,
the post contains generally unwanted content (racism, bigotry, xenophobia, slurs, argumentative language, etc).
In the coming weeks I will be working on a new “Post Guidelines” to reflect upon these changing evidentiary requirements, however I wish to upon a discussion with the community and hear out what they believe would constitute a post being of good quality.
One thing that we wish to see in future posts is more direct evidence of the scams being posted. Things such as screenshots are important when it comes to reporting to carriers, so just providing the text of the scam may not be the best way to make your posts going forward.
A way to have all phone numbers in the same format would be appreciated. Having the format such as (555) 123-5555, 555-123-5555 or a straight 5551235555 would surely help stop duplicates and make searching much easier. One distinct format for all numbers may also save time for our researchers. Thank you
I was just typing exactly this! @CatMan
Sometimes even after searching multiple number formats, I end up posting a duplicate anyway. I am still finding new ways for people to type numbers!
555. 123-5555
555. 123. 5555
I am glad that people are trying to improve quality here. I see so many posts with nothing but a phone number and maybe a one or two word description or title that’s half insults or misspelled words (which makes searching and categorizing harder).
Some suggestions and opinions from me, in addition to what’s been said already:
Use post categories and tags. They help categorize the information.
If a post contains the line “Please be sure to write out important info so that our content is accessible to screen readers!” it means that the writer didn’t even bother to edit their own post (and they probably didn’t bother to follow that instruction either). Posts that contain that line can be automatically deleted as low-quality.
If your post is about a phone number, website, or suspected scam organization that’s already been written up here, add to the existing thread instead of starting a new one. On the other hand, if you don’t have any reason to believe that a new number belongs to the same scam organization as an existing thread, start a new thread instead.
I was going to make the exact same suggestion @catman. Not only will it cut down on duplicate posts, I won’t have to literally check a number more than a dozen ways before posting it! People add a one before the number. (People at a plus sign and a one. People with the area code in (). People put dots between the numbers, people put dashes between the numbers. People put spaces between the numbers, others don’t put any space, etc)
A few years ago, we all agreed to use the format: xxx xxx-xxxx I still use it, but it’s become the wild West of formats.
The other thing is to please include the scam and the PHONE NUMBER in the header! I see posts all the time without the phone number up in the header, I usually edit the post and put it there when I see it.
By my highly scientific calculations, that gives us approximately 27 different ways to disguise the exact same phone number. And I’ve seen other variations.
For those of us who aren’t glued to the forum all day, and/or are busy, checking every possible variation before posting can turn into a carpal-tunnel-inducing endurance event. By the time we’ve searched the number in every known dialect of Phone Number, someone else has already posted it because they’re busy performing the same archaeological excavation.
Result: duplicate posts anyway.
It might be worth having the forum officially normalize a single format so a search with one format finds them all.
My keyboard, wrists, and remaining fragments of sanity would greatly appreciate it.
And also this format:
I have also seen in the past that users post numbers “as is” with a letter instead of the number. For example 0 = O
And I don’t fault the poster because a lot of times people can post whatever comes through to them as is… and scammers have occasionally sent their ‘contact’ phone number by hiding the numbers, scammers often replace numbers with letters to hide. I think some scammers do that to avoid being ‘flagged’? So if the user just does a copy/paste then it could create that issue.
This is just an example:
Scam number is this: 806-310-3729
Could be posted as: 8O6-3IO-3729
So if you add letters as numbers then it would be impossible to find! Maybe this issue can be given a little bit of leeway by admins.
reg the phone No. discussion: mb add a partial search/comparison as well as a pre-check for example: country code doesn’t match but the No. itself does), user could see a list of possible matches "was posted before: is this a different No.? yes/no)
for websites: some ppl post with/w/o www. (some sites have www. mandatory but most don’t so with/w/o might appear as new)
If the changing environment at Scammer.info is going to start heading down the path to censoring free speech then I will just close my account now and head to reddit instead. Who is going to determine what’s racist or bigoted or hateful when everyone has different standards & thresholds.
All speech, even obnoxious, bigoted speech is and should be protected unless it leads to fraudulent or criminal activity. Please don’t go down some low IQ woke path.
Scammer.info has always had this stance on hateful content. We are a platform for combatting fraud, not for “protecting speech”. Hateful, violent, and argumentative language has never been allowed on this platform, and this will continue being the case.
Right. But the point I was trying to make was that if you are going to start censoring people because you don’t like the way they present their information then you’re not helping either cause at that point. You missed the other point I made earlier which was there is no such thing as hate speech. The constitution protects all forms of speech. Even things that some people might consider racist.
presenting information and being bigoted are two different things.
We are a website, the first amendment is something that protects individuals from the government, not from others on the internet. If it did, sites like Reddit, Instagram, Discord, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, Tumblr, MySpace, LinkedIn, Nextdoor, Tiktok, Threads, Pinterest, or any other website with basic moderation wouldn’t be allowed to exist since they all “violate” the first amendment.
And I’ve seen other variations.