The 7 best Tumblr scams of all time

Even if we miss the NSFW content, we don't miss these incredible scams.
By Sage Anderson  on 
The 7 best Tumblr scams of all time
Aww shit, here we go again. Credit: VICKY LETA / MASHABLE COMPOSITE

It’s Cheat Week at Mashable. Join us as we take a look at how liars, scammers, grifters, and everyday people take advantage of life's little loopholes in order to get ahead.


I consider myself a storied Tumblr veteran. After all, I've maintained an account (at varying levels of activity) since 2010. After the great NSFW-pocalypse in 2018, in which Tumblr banned "all adult content" from the platform, about a third of users collectively jumped ship. But not I.

For me, and at least a few others, it's hard to leave the bizarrely unique social sphere of a site like Tumblr. The news that Verizon recently sold the website to Automattic (the owners of WordPress) barely fazed us. There are legitimate reasons why we've stuck around for so long, most of all for the personal, tight-knit community early internet message boards and fan sites were known for. It's almost like a semi-private group chat, where you can be out as LGBTQ, hyperfixate on weird shit, and openly kin Naruto (do not ask).

The nature of the Tumblr "bubble" also allows a lot of messed-up shit to breed like crazy. Those of us in the Five-Plus Years Club are just BenAffleckSmoking.JPG about Tumblr drama now, having seen users pull all kinds of weird stunts — from the Mishapocalypse to a collective of Sheriff Woodys taking over dead blogs to a user who literally stole bones from a graveyard. But nothing on God's green internet can ever compare to the Tumblr scams. There's been embezzlement, catfishing, so-called "social experiments," and more.

If Tumblr truly is on its last legs, I feel it is my civic duty to capture the best and worst of its many scams for posterity. May we never forget.

1. So, you wanna raise some funds?

Scroll through the Tumblr dashboard, and you'll stumble across all kinds of crowdfunding efforts, big and small — GoFundMes for medical expenses, monthly Patreons for artists, and everyday Venmo and Ko-Fi links in the bios of well, pretty much anyone.

But if the entire website seems almost instinctively allergic to spending a dime on larger projects, especially big, creative endeavors, it's for good reason. After a series of widely shared fundraising efforts crashed into flames, it was the Tumblr public who were left feeling burned.

The two most infamous attempts were Miss Officer and Mr. Truffles, and All or Nothing. While they didn't necessarily kick off the trend, they were emblematic of a lot of issues with crowdfunding on Tumblr-based projects.

The first involved a viral image of a Canadian policewoman having an adorable interaction with a baby bear cub in 2014. Ami Guillén, known as lemonteaflower, drew cartoon-y fan art of the aww-inspiring Yogi Bear-like duo, and the concept became an instant smash hit. She sold T-shirts. Other fans made a theme song. There was even an animation of the two head-banging in a cop car to Spice Girls' Wannabe.

Guillén, who was 18, then created a Kickstarter to fund the creation of an animated show based on the two, titled Miss Officer and Mr. Truffles. Several scandals immediately plagued the project — the $80,000 asking price seemed suspiciously too high to the Tumblr community for the initial production of a 7-minute short, artists who worked on the project claimed they were overworked and underpaid, and the homophobic slur in Guillén's former username didn't sit well with many.

The Kickstarter only reached around $10,000, and the whole deal was shelved. Guillén has since apologized but is loathe to call it a "scam," as "the project never got funded so no one lost money from the whole issue."

All or Nothing faced an almost identical trajectory in 2014. Fan art centering around the concept of a show about two roommates (an outgoing, flirtatious asexual and a socially awkward pansexual) went viral. The OG artist gave permission to a group who wanted to start an Indiegogo campaign to make it a live-action web series. The group turned out to consist of "~18yo friends in the Las Vegas area, mostly wannabe actors, none with any relevant qualifications or experience to speak of," according to the artist.

However, surprise, surprise — the project got funded. In a post titled "What happened to the $5,899," the original artist breaks down the whole catastrophe. TL;DR: no content was ever released, the whole team deleted social media accounts soon after, and the family of one of the leads on the project used the money to cover personal costs. "If you donated: you’re not getting your money back and you probably should have seen this coming," the post concludes [emphasis theirs].

Both instances were neither particularly heinous nor really big money schemes, though. The projects were run by teens who didn't initially set out to scam anyone, who genuinely wanted to make something, and who were just overestimating, underestimating, or generally mismanaging their funds along the way.

But scams during the same periods seemed time and time again to face those issues, and worse: content creators with abusive behavior, claims of harassing minors, and the embezzlement of $16,000 for trans youth.

This all suddenly made the Tumblr community very skeptical about where donations were going. The lesson: Content creators aren't infallible, and should be called out for their behavior if necessary.

2. Sixpenceee Heals

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Do I get Xanax for an extra $5 a month? Credit: RoosterBooster/Tubmlr

Ever feel like letting some rando whose only therapeutic experience is a Psych 101 course diagnose you? Tumblr user Sixpenceee sure thought we'd all chomp at the bit for some of that prime experience!

Sixpenceee was not a mental health professional. In fact, she was (and still is) a horror and supernatural blogger who was already well-documented as being kind of a huge, ableist jerk. But in 2017, for some reason, she decided to launch the program "Sixpenceee Heals," in which she would accept up to 15 submissions a month from people wanting to talk to her about their mental health struggles. For $30, she would then write up an individualized guide to help that person.

"So I noticed how unhappiness can really plague us," Sixpenceee wrote in the original post. "Sometimes life throws so many curveballs at us. It prevents us from being happy and free-spirited. I really want to reach out and help people break free of certain negative patterns in their live."

In Marianne Williamson fashion, the twenty-something went on to describe herself as an "extremely intuitive and empathetic individual" who would help anyone "transcend confusion, and self-limiting beliefs." Nobody bought it, especially since her whole brand of supernatural stories involved making mentally ill people out to be "scary" freaks.

The idea was almost immediately panned as an exploitative shit show. In a classic 24-hour turn around, Sixpenceee canceled the project the day after posting about it. And that's not even the worst thing she could've been canceled for. (Wait until you hear about her family's alleged child servants.)

3. The search for the author of My Immortal

"Hi my name is Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way." As famous as "Call me Ishmael" or "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," this opening line belongs to the single most important piece of fanwork of the 2000s. "My Immortal," the beloved mess of Harry Potter fanfiction posted in 2006 on Fanfiction.net, is infamous for its hilariously terrible plot, l33t speak-riddled dialogue, and Hot Topic levels of emo aesthetic. It's also infamous for its illusive, unknown author, only known as "Tara Gilesbie."

But for a brief moment, Tumblr felt like it had cracked the code. A woman who may or may not actually be named Rose Christo revealed herself to be the legendary author "Tara" in a fairly random reply to someone else's Tumblr post in 2017. As Vox explains, she claimed to be a "Native American Cree lesbian" who, 11 years after posting "My Immortal," was writing a memoir called Under the Same Stars (which had allegedly been in the works with Macmillan Publishing before the Tumblr post). The book would detail "her search for her younger brother as a teen after being placed in New York City foster care as a victim of child abuse and child pornography." The writing in the original fic was supposed to be intentionally terrible — so bad, in fact, that it would catch the attention of the large fandom community. She claimed she would use that community's resources to help reunite with her brother.

OK. A little outlandish, but there seemed to be a little bit of proof at first, including her Tumblr FAQ, where she claimed to have official court documents backing up her family story, an old flash drive from 2006 with copies of "My Immortal," and screenshots of her Fictionpress account.

That is, until someone claiming to be her brother went on Kiwifarms (like 4chan, but for harassing and stalking internet figures) and said that Rose Christo’s real name was Theresa Christodoulopoulos, she was white, they were never in foster care, and it was all publicity to sell her new book. Yikes. While the legitimacy of the claim has yet to be fully substantiated, it seemed enough to plant the seeds of doubt and ruin her reputation.

Macmillan Publishers has since pulled the memoir from production. And after admitting to forging the aforementioned court documents that would've identified her, Rose or Theresa or Tara has since deleted her Tumblr and Twitter accounts. It's not a complete admission of guilt, so the mystery lives on.

4. Literal Russian psy-ops

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Aah, the sweet smell of propaganda in the morning. Credit: terror-billie/tumblr

So it turns out Russia used sock puppet propaganda accounts to try and sway the 2016 election on social media, and 84 of them were on Tumblr. This is the world we live in.

In March of 2018, Tumblr broke their silence on the investigation into the IRA (Internet Research Agency) and released the full list of usernames and aliases connected to "state-sponsored disinformation and propaganda campaigns." Users also received a fun little email from Tumblr stating whether they'd ever interacted with one of these accounts. Nice!

New York Magazine outlined how many of these accounts were adept at imitating American internet culture. They would "rip popular Twitter posts and re-upload them to Tumblr." Several seemed to support activist efforts such as Black Lives Matter, and would make "innocuous" posts that were "socially conscious, but not explicitly political." They even knew how to properly dunk on white people.

But they were also putting on the mask of the other political side, with accounts that posted conservative, Trump-supporting, Hillary-bashing content. Overall, everyone was getting played.

While these accounts have since been shut down, it's haunting just how easy it was to infiltrate an entire community. Although, in typical Tumblr fashion, the only lesson anyone seemed to learn was that you can't trust anyone, not even yourself.

5. Cole Sprouse's "social experiment"

How many celebrities can you list that have actually used Tumblr? I mean, John Mulaney's on there! Kinda. (He's mostly promoting his own appearances.) Taylor Swift occasionally drops in to tease and dangle album lore strings for fans deep into some Swiftie theorizing. Lin-Manuel Miranda was probably the most active, until he rage quit over seeing Hamilton bootlegs fill the tags (as well as real person fanfiction, but we'll get to that later.)

It's understandable that public figures don't tend to want to tip their toes into Tumblr weirdness. But once upon a time childhood Disney Channel star Cole Sprouse took the plunge!

Before he was a weirdo with a stupid hat on Riverdale, The Suite Life and Zack and Cody star was just a guy who had grown up and gotten a Tumblr. And he was suddenly hot, too, I guess.

Sprouse's blog was titled "Coleture Concept"; on it, he encouraged fans to "discuss the issues that matter" with him. But it quickly degraded into him waxing poetic about vague philosophical concepts, getting oddly defensive while arguing with fans about anthropology, and somehow ... defending reverse racism?

Instead of just owning up to being kind of a dick, he doubled down hard. In an act of pretentious cringiness, he "revealed" that his whole blog had been nothing more than a "social experiment" the whole time, and we were all pawns for his research into the world of micro-blogging. In a follow-up Twitter thread he claimed that the act of stating it was a social experiment was, in fact, another social experiment to see "how people react[ed] to a suggestion of being observed." Bro, what?

He deleted everything after that, but because the internet never forgets, an archive of his posts still exists. He was right about one thing — "I don't know you, you don't know me. Don't blindly follow someone."

6. I can't even begin to sum this up, but if you've ever even heard of Hamilton, please read this

Remember how I mentioned Hamilton and real person fanfiction before? Yeah, you're gonna want to sit down for this one.

I feel like SNL's Stephan announcing the absolute most convoluted fandom nonsense possible here. This scam has everything: Faking being HIV positive. Lesbians. Cannibal mermaids. Hamilton. Lin-Manuel Miranda RPF (real person fanfic). OK, you ready? Let's jump in.

Essentially, there was well-known blog called hivliving that was supposedly co-run by "Israa," a nonbinary Chinese-Pakistani human trafficking survivor, and "Naj," a lesbian of color, both based in India. Their blog alternated between the two of them, discussing activism and personal experiences with trauma and being HIV+.

But after "Naj" linked to a cash.me fundraiser, claiming to need help with medical expenses, they were exposed in a callout post by Tumblr user digoxin-purpurpea, who noticed it was impossible for "Naj" to be living in India when their cash.me was U.S.-based.

It turned out that "Naj" and "Israa" were actually fake identities created by one person, a white American college student. And no, she did not actually have HIV. She reportedly created the personas to gain credibility as a person living with HIV so she could promote her HIV-centric modern high school AU Hamilton fanfiction set in the 1980s. Yeah.

But, oh wait, there's more. Don't throw callout stones in glass fandom houses, because Tumblr sensed an even deeper reason for the highly publicized scam callout. Rumor has it that digoxin-purpurpea may have been motivated to investigate hivliving after the blog and its followers called them out for writing — drum roll please — Hamilton-inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda RPF cannibal mermaid fic!

Yes, those are real words put together into a sentence. If you have a headache, I understand. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. If you're dying for more screenshots and receipts™️, fanlore.org has archived the whole shenanigan.

7. Dashcon

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RIP the ball pit, forever in our hearts. :'( Credit: oh-look-im-using-the-internet/tumblr

Ah, Dashcon — the Fyre Festival of Tumblr.

It was probably the most widely reported, infamous, hilariously spectacular disaster to ever befall the website, and the 2014 convention in Schaumburg, Illinois, wasn't even technically affiliated with Tumblr.

There are tons of pieces dissecting the wildly mismanaged convention (run by 6 administrators and fundraised by various fandom "committees.") There are even attendants who, to this day, say it was not that bad, guys, seriously.

Like most Tumblr scams, there are many layers, so here's a brief recap: First off, only 500 to 1,000 people showed up out of an estimated 7,000. A misallocation of funds had the organizers scrambling and begging con-goers to donate $17,000 by the end of the first night, as the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center Hotel was "threatening to shut down" the event. The cast of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale canceled their panel after their flights, hotel, and performance fee went unpaid, and angry attendees were compensated with "an extra hour" in a very sad, half-deflated children's ball pit.

There was other general disorganization, cancellations, and chaos, but no one could deny that the con was doomed from the start. While it's hard once again to say if this was a Billy McFarland-level of group manipulation, its enduring legacy exemplifies the tenants of most Tumblr "scams": Young people who overshot their goal, and the users who believed in them — their wallets and dignities ultimately suffering for it.

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Sage Anderson

Sage is the newest Culture writer on the block at Mashable NYC. They recently graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, and have previously worked for The Dr. Oz Show, NorthSouth Productions, and on Netflix's 'The OA Part II'. Off the clock, they can be found testing out cupcake recipes, collecting dolls, and watching Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure for the millionth time.


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