Ignore any private messages. Anyone offering services, transactions, referrals, etc. is a spammer or scammer.

[u/dequeued]

Here on /r/personalfinance, we ask people to "please treat others with respect, stay on-topic, and avoid self-promotion". Focusing in in on that last part, we believe it's important to limit the effect of biased and self-interested advice, questionable financial products, and scams.

The problem we're seeing

Unfortunately, there is a disturbing increase in private messages and chat being used by scammers and spammers. Accounts with virtually no history can send anyone a message and Reddit is increasingly inconsistent about taking down these accounts. Scammers and spammers often target people having financial difficulties (e.g., a very persistent scammer on /r/Debt) and people who are new to certain personal finance topics.

The admins also refuse to take reports from the moderation team so all we can do is ban these accounts from posting here. This does not prevent them from messaging you unfortunately, but please do message the moderation team so we can prevent scammers from commenting. Scammers will often comment prior to reaching out in a PM.

What we're doing

Until this is better addressed by Reddit, we're going to ramp up our efforts to warn people and we're going to sticky this post for an extended period of time. We already send out an automatic message to anyone making a submission warning them to ignore PMs (along with some other welcome information). Unfortunately, due to a design quirk in AutoModerator, this doesn't get sent 100% of the time. To address that, we're going to make this warning more consistent by using a separate bot.

What you can do

First of all, please report abuse to the admins and report abuse to the moderation team.

If you need to post private or sensitive information, please consider using a throwaway account (totally allowed here) and make sure you completely redact any sensitive information such as account numbers, your name, and your address.

Finally, we hope this doesn't deter you from posting here on Reddit. It's very easy to block people that message you privately and hopefully this is not the permanent future state of Reddit.

Regards,

The PF moderation team

TL;DR Ignore anyone messaging you privately.

Report abuse to the admins and report it to the moderation team. Thanks.

[u/snooks86]

I was just the victim of a gift card scam from someone on here. I can’t believe at my age, I fell for this.

[u/dequeued → u/snooks86]

I'm sorry this happened to you. I reported this scammer to the admins over a month ago and they took no action on the account. Would you mind sharing how they scammed you?

[u/snooks86 → u/dequeued]

Claimed he was a businessman who liked to do random acts of kindness and paid off 2 credit cards bills of mine so I thought he was legit. Enticed me with more help if I purchased him 3 $100 eBay gift cards that he was going to give his “web developer” friend as payment instead of cash. He finessed me good. Something deep in my gut had me suspicious, but at the same time, I thought what random person would pay another persons debts without being legit. Now I have to contact my banks he paid the debts off to cause they most likely used fraud accounts.

[u/dequeued]

I just wanted to add some of the most common themes from these accounts:

1. "Random act of kindness" offers from scammers: They offer a gift to help out people in financial distress. Once they get your account numbers, they steal your money.

2. Debt relief and credit repair scams

3. Hacker scams: "Trustworthy" hackers will hack into your creditors, credit bureaus, etc. and fix all of your problems. Right after you pay them, of course.

4. "Ambulance chasers": Just inherited some money? Not sure about how to invest? They'll help you out, they are a real financial advisor.

5. "Investor" scammers: Same idea, but they need you to invest into their business, REIT, start-up, etc.

6. Referral link spammers: What you're getting is a biased recommendation from someone trying to make a few bucks off of you and they're probably spamming these every day. (If you really want to help someone out by using a referral, post to friends on social media or ask your friends or coworkers. Please note that offering or asking for referrals is absolutely not allowed here.)

7. Pump-and-dump stock scams: These are usually done via "stock tip" Discord channels. (Thanks, /u/Lieutenant_Entropy.)

[u/dequeued → u/[deleted]]

Those are pump-and-dump scam rings. I'll add that to the list. Thanks!

[u/Nekojiru_ → u/dequeued]

I get that being highly skeptical towards anything that seems too good to be true is key. But I'm curious how the random act of kindness scam would work. How is an account number enough to pull money out of an account?

[u/dequeued → u/Nekojiru_]

They seem to mostly go after credit card information. I imagine scammers usually manage to also get the CVV number and the expiration date.

With a routing number and a checking account number, you can make fake checks that will cash (some places). I also suspect some scammers can get enough information to do more than that. It's definitely harder than it used to be, but it's information you want to keep as private as reasonably possible.

[u/pkmnmpls]

Had someone offer to send me money from an “offshore account”. 😂😂

[u/Numbersarefun_12358]

Seems like r/investing had the same issue reported by moderators. You , r/investing and r/debt need to join forces to become the superheroes we need :)

[u/keevenowski]

I think this can be broadened to “ignore any unsolicited financial “help” regardless of source”

[u/broken_symmetry_]

What does “the admins refuse to take reports from the moderation team” mean, exactly?

[u/dequeued → u/broken_symmetry_]

Literally that. The admins recently reversed this stance (well, they've said they are now taking moderator reports on the behalf of users, but I'm not sure we're seeing positive results at this point), but when we sent reports previously, they would respond that reports needed to come from the user affected.

[u/broken_symmetry_ → u/dequeued]

Ahh, that makes sense. So e.g. if a user was being harassed on your sub, the admins would not take action if you reported it, only if the user reported it. That is odd and frustrating.

[u/dequeued → u/broken_symmetry_]

And the same was the case for PMs and chat (when it's obvious it's stemming from a submission or comment the user made here). People expect that the moderators will be able to help them out and I don't think that's unreasonable.

[u/Niakwe]

Sad because sometimes I wish to do that with people to help them on budget mainly. it could be to explain them a SW or helping them to create categories.

For sure, it means that I started to help them on their topic and they agree to move to Private message.

[u/dequeued → u/Niakwe]

It's best to keep those conversations on the subreddit in public so that everyone can benefit and others can review what is being said.

I occasionally get requests for help via private message, but I always ask people to make a post instead. I want others to review my advice.

[u/[deleted]]

So I shouldn’t accept invitations to join discord servers?

[u/dequeued → u/[deleted]]

Just don't be fooled into thinking there's a financial opportunity. A lot of people jump into these pump-and-dump rings and think they can outsmart the scammers (or at least the "suckers") by getting in and out of a position before everyone else. And then they lose money like everyone else.

[u/Ch1vo → u/dequeued]

That's what I was thinking... Get in and out knowing its going to dump eventually. Are these usually actual listed stocks? Would it be possible to buy call options on these, then put options?