#also scammers please stop trying to scam me I’m just going to hex you

[infernalembrace]

My family is still staying in half of the church that wasn’t affected by the bombing because there is nowhere else to stay other than tents. They are limited to one small meal a day and one shower a week. They are sleeping on the floors, but no one can sleep since there is bombing everywhere around them. Even when there is no bombing, they can still hear the loud buzzing sound of the military planes above them, which would keep anyone who hears it awake. Along with everything, My grandma has diabetes and osteoporosis, so she can’t walk. She has to take her insulin medication along with many others; however, she has run out of many of her medications.” Am on my knees requesting for donation. Target $450

Hey y’all! Today I am going to teach you all an easy way to spot scammers. You see this ask I just got? It looks like a typical ask you may get from an actual Palestinian person who needs aid. However, there are a couple of things that give it away as a scam.

Generic, autogenerated username (these are urls that tumblr automatically suggests for you when you first sign up.) Typically a blog run by an actually Palestinian in Gaza seeking aid will have a username that seems actually thought up by a person (usually containing their name/surname, at least from what I see, but of course not always.)

They have a PayPal link and not a GFM. PayPal doesn’t work in Palestine, last I checked.

Unvetted. Now it is important to be VERY DISCERNING when it comes to unvetted GFMs/donation drives. There are less and less people who can do the actual vetting (AFAIK, that process involves someone who is actually physically there and/or can read or speak Arabic to check IDs & verify that the person is actually in Gaza and is who they say they are) so some non-scam legit GFMs are not currently vetted due to that.

Reusing pictures from other GFM posts. You can try using something like tineye or reverse image search on google to check this. DO NOTE that this is not always a sign of a scam and you must be discerning. (From what I’ve seen, sometimes posts might have a few photos in common as they are made by different members from the same family.)

EDIT: It was just brought to my attention that this scam in particular has also stolen text from a different GFM. This is also a sign of a scam.

My tip for not getting scammed? Search the person’s URL on tumblr, or check the replies/notes of their pinned post. There you will usually find other people saying if the post is a scam or not. There is also a Google doc of various vetted GFMs that I linked in a previous post.

So when you encounter a scammer, BLOCK THEM and let others know they’re a scammer! The people who actually need our help are already suffering & are humiliated by the dehumanizing positions they’ve been put in, we don’t need people trying to add on to that with scams.