Let's take down the 20b / 300m giveaway scammer
If you've been skilling at GE on world 84, you might have seen a lot of people continuously spam "300m giveaway, DM me" message. This is an elaborate phishing scam targeting vulnerable players and tricking them into giving away their account credentials.
This is how they perform their trick. When you DM them, they won't give any money. Instead, they'll ask you to search for a specific account name on Youtube and follow instructions in their only video. In the description, you would find a link that seems to redirect to an official Runescape forum, but it's actually a fake website. How do I know it's a fake website? For starters, it's not a `.com` domain. There are many ways to determine how it's a fake website, but I'll not get into the details here.
I got fed up with this scammer getting success, so I took some action. I looked up the domain registrar for the fake website, contacted their abuse team and reported this activity. Within 48 hours, this website has been shut down. Success!
Or did I really succeed? 10 hours later, I log back into the game and here it is. Another bot spamming the same message in chat. I know that I can repeat the process and get the scammer banned again, but I have limited time and energy. Keeping in mind that the scammer is no longer responding to my in-game messages, I know that I can't do this alone.
So here I am, asking for some help from fellow players who want to keep bringing these fake websites down so that the scammer eventually gives up. Please reply here if you can help in any of the following ways:
- Find names of players who keep spamming the "20b / 2b / 300m giveaway. DM me" messages in chat. Note that these may be hacked accounts and Jagex shouldn't necessarily outright ban them.
- DM the scammer and find names of Youtube channels the scammer keeps creating.
- Report the scammer from within the game as soon as you get the Youtube channel name from them.
I know that this might seem like a waste of efforts, but keep in mind that the scammer exclusively targets member worlds, which means that people who have quite possibly spent real money are losing their accounts. I will accept any help in stopping this. Have a good day.
Edit: There are a lot of comments and I won't be able to respond to all of them individually. But the common stance seems to be of acceptance of the existence of bots/scammers. I understand that you've gotten used to it over the years, but we can't be okay with it! The least we could do is make some noise so that Jagex does something about it. Be it educating new players or cutting off scammers. Whatever the case is, I'll continue reporting the websites to shut them down. Help me if you can.
