How To Spot And Avoid Discord Scams Easily

This guide is specialized on Discord scams. Other guides may be made if this one is appreciated.

Obviously this will not eliminate 100% of the risks but it will give you a good basis to be more vigilant.

The way discord works makes a lot of scams possible, it is easy to make a service look real with fake members, fake vouchs and many others. (Writer: Petrov)

How to verify that the service is real ?
First of all, nothing is ever 100% safe and it is always necessary to trade with caution and use the services of reputable MMs regardless of the reputation of the service.

1) The easiest way : threads and MiddleMan use.
This part will be the shortest and simplest, before buying on discord, check if this service has a thread on Nulled or another reputable forum.

If the service doesn’t have a thread on a forum, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a scam,but it’s logical to think that a functional service that interests a lot of customers would tend to advertise on forums,

to attract people and have a reputation. So this is a first element to take into account.

Second element, very important and even mentioned in the rules: always use a MiddleMan,

it’s generally a bad idea to purchase and use a service that refuses to use a MM (even if it’s in their right to do so)

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s move on to explain the methods you can use to avoid scams on Discord.
*You should know that I will try in this guide to propose tools that do not require any installation but be aware that there are many addons like BetterDiscord

that will allow you to have a lot of additional tools and information directly in Discord, which can be faster and easier.

2) Check the server creation date
First of all, most of the tools that will be used here require to have your discord in developer mode, to do that:
a. Go in your user settings on Discord
b. Click on the “Advanced” section
c. Turn on “Developer Mode”

The following link will be useful to check the creation date of a server, an account, a channel, etc… so keep it aside because it is very useful. https://hugo.moe/dis…ation-date.html

To check the creation date, once the developer mode is activated, just right click on the icon of the server in question and “copy the ID”.

Once you have the ID copy it to the site above and it will give you the date directly.

Why this information is useful to us ?

  1. Most Discord scams will be done on servers created just for the occasion, most of the time as soon as the scammer has enough money in his pocket,

the server is deleted and the owner account with it. The creation date of a server is therefore a good first indicator.

This is sometimes useful when server admins and “customers” claim to have ordered a product 1 month ago or something like that,

while the server was created just 2 days ago. This is a good first indication to continue your investigation.

Note: It is also possible that a discord server of a real and trusted service has been recently deleted, so the creation date of a service should not be the only element to take into account of course.

3) Check if the server members are real
This part is very important.

A) Account creation date
Most of the time server admins or supposed customers of a server created to scam people will have very recent creation dates,

no Nitro subscription, no other servers in common with you or even no activity status. I’ll explain how to check everything.

First, you need to check the creation date of the admin accounts as well as the accounts that have posted positive evaluations of the server (and other members aswell if you want to)
To do that, it’s exactly like the previous part about the server creation date except that you have to right-click on the profile picture of the member and “Copy ID”.

Once you have entered the ID in the site above, you will have the date of creation of the account.

To understand why it’s useful, it’s important to know that Discord works with a system of “tokens”,every discord account got a specific token, and if you got it you can login onto the account without the email or password.

Obviously, some people run businesses where they sell discord tokens created with specific tools, with the only purpose to increase the number of members on a server, to spam people in DM or friend request, and many other uses.

These tokens are therefore very useful for someone who would like to make his server look real, full of members and customers.

Some tokens can even be “alive”, they can have an activity status where they play a game, avatars, sentences in their bio, Spotify, etc…

What 90% of these tokens have in common is that they are created in bulk and very regularly (or even on demand when you buy) which means that most of them will be 1 or 2 months old maximum.

Why this information is useful to us ?

That’s where it’s useful for us, if the scammer in charge of the server used these kind of tokens to make you believe that the server was active and real,

most of the members will have very recent creation dates (sometimes even almost the same creation date for a hundred members).

Members activity/messages

a) Game activity

On a real discord service members will tend to be active, either on the server or on Discord itself.

Once you have checked the creation date of the account, there are many other things to check,

A small detail to know for statuses where the member is playing video game is that if by clicking on it you can’t see since when the person is playing this game it’s because this status is emulated by a tool,

and therefore it’s very likely that this member is a bot.

A correct game activity status will look like this :
image

Members ability to respond

You should know that fake members (bots) can talk in the chat, mostly when they are controlled by someone real behind.

However, you have to be logical: if a member on a discord is online and not playing a game or doesn’t seem busy, he should answer you quickly right?

This is where most discord scams fail, because if the account is a bot it will probably never respond to a private message (PM) because most of the tools or services

used to get fake members on discord don’t provides a system to alert the person behind it that one of the bots has received a PM.

Why this information is useful to us ?

Obviously even a real person might not respond to a PM, but what is the probability that 5/5 of the customers of the service you have PMed will not respond to your message even after an hour?

You see, this immediately becomes very implausible.

c) Members messages & vouch pictures
If you have already gone through all the previous steps and everything seems fine, there are still a few details that can help you detect a scam.

Most services, real or not, always have a #vouch channel on the discord server, which is where the scammer often puts a lot of effort to have the most credible server possible.

This is also where some details can be spotted, like for example the metadata and exif of the voucher pictures.

Exif & metadata

Each photo taken by a phone, tablet or other will always have unique data (unless they were erased/modified): device used, settings of the device, sometimes even the geographical coordinates and the location of the photo.

Using this tool : https://jimpl.com/ you just need to copy the URL of the picture and paste into the website and you’ll be able to check the exif & matadata of the pictures.

So the usefulness for us is that you will check with all the photos of all the vouchers if there are identical data,

if you have the same data on each photo (while they are posted by a different person), there is a big chance that it is the same person who took all the photos.

Reverse Image Search

If the scammer used pictures that are not his own, he probably used pictures that are available on the internet, on ebay or local websites,

which means that there is a chance that the pictures can be found via reverse search tools such as: https://www.reverseimagesearch.com/ or https://tineye.com/

You now have many different tools and methods to take your precautions and avoid jumping into the unknown.

Obviously this will not eliminate 100% of the risks, but it will give you a basis to be more vigilant.

But now you have many different tools and methods to take your precautions and avoid jumping into the unknown.

Happy learning!

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Thank you very much!