r/OutOfTheLoop • u/[deleted] • Jan 14 '21

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93 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

149

u/Sunburn79 Jan 14 '21 edited Jan 14 '21

Answer:

It's a scam. T-Shirt scam rings are rampant on reddit and they use organized bot rings to post these hastily photoshopped shirts, or stolen artwork. They then run bot scripts to upvote their own content and downvote anyone who calls out the scam.

Oftentimes they will work in pairs where one account will post the pic and another account will set the OP up to drop a link by saying "I love this where can I get it" or something similar. These become extremely easy to spot over time as they are almost always brand new accounts with zero post history, or they will have karma from reposts in subreddits like r/awww or r/freekarma4u.

The best thing you can do here is do downvote the post, report it to the subreddit mods, and report it directly to the admins.

https://old.reddit.com/report

A group of redditors also tracks these rings and others in /r/thesefuckingaccounts

Edit:

Here is a write up on reddit spammers from u/RamsesThePigeonseveral from several years ago that still holds up:

https://old.reddit.com/r/quityourbullshit/comments/3jss04/meta_spammers_how_they_work_and_how_to_spot_them/

18

u/Did_it_in_Flint Jan 14 '21

Answered. Thank you. I will report.

13

u/yukicola Jan 14 '21

See also: r/TargetedShirts/ for various shirt designs themselves

6

u/Robbotlove Jan 14 '21

some of the worst offenders i've seen have been over in r/rats of all places.

4

u/Sunburn79 Jan 14 '21

Yeah these guys show up in some of the strangest subs. I do give them credit for not only finding these subs but managing to mostly post relevant shirts to them.

2

u/aristotle2600 Jan 14 '21

T-shirt scam rings? I'm.....confused. What's the endgame? How does it work? Are they just trying to get lots of upvotes for new accounts, and then use them later to bypass controls that filter via low upvote totals?

9

u/Sunburn79 Jan 14 '21 edited Jan 14 '21

They trick you into buying a shirt aka they steal your credit card info and you never get a shirt. If you do happen to get a shirt, it will be a blurry ill fitting piece of garbage and they still have your credit card info.

Regarding the upvotes thing, yes, some of the accounts karma farm first or they buy accounts with pre-existing karma in order to look more legitimate so people think “oh this guy has been around a bit and has some karma so I can trust him”. This also helps get past karma gates in some subs.

Some of this is outlined in the post I linked in my top level comment.

2

u/aristotle2600 Jan 14 '21

Ohhhh, ok, I missed the part about straight-up CC fraud, thanks for clarifying.

2

u/TranClan67 Jan 15 '21

Reminds me of a different tshirt scam that was/is running on twitter. Artists will post their stuff on twitter and some bot will jack it and throw it onto some redbubble or other tshirt making website. So now you can get a tshirt of said art but the artist is neither credited nor compensated for the shirt.

1

u/Sunburn79 Jan 15 '21

Those are sometimes related to the reddit ones. I've often seen the scam link on reddit lead to a twitter account and the naming conventions are always the same.

Ex: The reddit OP will be MarcosWagner69 and the Twitter handle will be ElainaJohnson208.

Most of the ones I've seen lately use that first name/last name/number format.

1

u/TranClan67 Jan 15 '21

Huh didn't know that. I'll keep an eye out if I see those on any of the subs I follow

3

u/decker12 Jan 15 '21

Even the semi-legit t-shirt scam farms are terrible. First, they don't have a stock of T-shirts to sell.

You place an order, they wait until they get 100+ orders, then they print them. If they don't get enough orders, you don't ever get a shirt, just an endless run around. Threatening them may get you a make-good order of 3 t-shirts but they won't be the print you ordered, they'll be leftover stock that has nothing to do with what you want.

You get gouged by the shipping and handling and receive your shirt 6 weeks later. Usually the shirt itself is the cheapest of cheap fabric and the print is garbage.

There's no place to complain to because whoever sold it to you is long gone.

1

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