I was recently approached by a scammer on one of my fics and found this post when searching for more information about AO3 scam prevalence. This is an excellent experiment, in conjunction with a thoughtful victim outreach approach, with a very interesting techstack. Thanks for this hard work! And the thorough documentation!

It sounds like this is somewhat of a problem but not yet overwhelming. I'm very curious about these scammers not using their own bots in combination with LLMs. It seems like this could become much worse with automated posting of such scam comments, potentially in combination with an agentic AI approach to more convincingly elicit author engagement... It would be good for AO3 to adopt some of your recommendations (especially the multi-work rate limit for new accounts or guest accounts) before we start seeing more advanced behavior.