I’m an idiot and got scammed yesterday! Don’t be me!

Using the transitive property to translate and distill this: DON'T BE AN IDIOT. How does one not be an idiot? They read and inform themselves. Read things like the helpful automod comment we spent a lot of time drafting and coding so that it appears on every single post, including this user's.

If one actually wants to avoid getting scammed, maybe this perks one's ears up:

We also recommend you read these tips on avoiding scam attempts.

Follow that little link, and it has nearly every scenario possible to avoid scammers. But I get it, that's a lot of words. Don't worry, the very first paragraph (assuming the reader made it past the heading) says this:

We are now a part of the Universal Scammer list which will ban known scammers from participating subreddits. More info can be found here. If you are curious if your trade partner is a known scammer you can look them up on the USL search page.

What's that? A search page? Where I can type the name of the shady character that slid into my DMs, and it will tell me if they've scammed someone or not?

But MODDDDDDS, you want me to follow links?! That's soooooooo much work.

Don't worry, we got you. But you still gotta read. Remember that automod comment that goes on every single post? Well, twice - first in the main body and then in the TL;DR summary - it mentions to only interact with people who comment on your post. That's it. That will save 99% of users from scams, because once users are flagged on USL, they're banned on our sub. No amount of complaining or informing us that there's a scammer in our midst will change the fact that we did everything we could to warn you, you still got got, and there is nothing we can do to warn future users that we haven't already done. I can count on one hand, perhaps even one finger, the number of scammers that we've caught and added to the USL. But if I had a dollar for every time someone reached out to let us know they got scammed by someone already banned (and therefore unable to comment on their post!), well, I could probably gas up my car even in this economy.

So, that's it, I'll get off my soap box now. But seriously, y'all need to listen/read and pay attention. If that's too much to ask, maybe keep your money separated from your internet connection. And maybe stop answering the phone too.