Hello e621,

For months there have been these sort of cheesy poorly-animated clickbait ads popping up everywhere since late spring/summer. Ads like the one with "WAGS? LICKS? NIPS? WHAT SHOULD SHE DO NEXT?" and the one that says "WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?" with some male anthro...thing rubbing his face in arousal and a female anthro cat wiggling her ass and looking at you. You see, these ads came off as mildly infuriating to me and one day I decided to check out what all that advertising is about.

Well, it turns out that they're advertising a """yiff""" """dating""" site named FurFling, which is a known scam. The same people also run several other dating scam sites, such as FurryMate and BronyMate. On FurFling, you have to pay for everything except viewing and editing your profile (you even have to pay to view messages and other people's profiles!), all the accounts you get messages from are fake profiles run by pornbots, and as one Reddit user u/GreenReaper pointed out, they're probably not even furries themselves and just want to con some money from a niche. There's also the risk of identity theft cause they don't accept PayPal. (And before y'all think I fell for their BS, I never paid them at all or even created an account there. Not in a million years.)

Honestly, I'm kinda disappointed in y'all. That's sooooo not cool man.

-Nympheon Gang

Sources:
Flayrah article (Comments also have some important info, such as FurAffinity pulling sister site FurryMate's ads due to deceptive practices)
GreenReaper's comment and its replies on Reddit

blame the victims why dont you

I don't think the admins or really anyone that would read a post on the forums have much at all to do with what dragonfru.it puts on the banner ads.

darryus said:
I don't think the admins or really anyone that would read a post on the forums have much at all to do with what dragonfru.it puts on the banner ads.

Well, the whois entry has a lot of redacted information, so I can't be sure, but I was under the impression that e621 and/or Bad Dragon staff were the operators of the dragonfru.it ads.

It seems like it's been a while since the last time the ads were brought up, maybe e621 would be willing to discuss the matter if there are ads for sites that people broadly believe are being deceptive.

If these websites are "known scams" then what's the point of this post?
Are you asking the admins to have these advertisements removed?

TwistedLogik said:
If these websites are "known scams" then what's the point of this post?
Are you asking the admins to have these advertisements removed?

Saying "known scams" doesn't imply that absolutely everyone knows about it. It just means that these scams are old.

Nigerian Prince scams are also known, yet people still fall for them.

Volphied said:
Saying "known scams" doesn't imply that absolutely everyone knows about it. It just means that these scams are old.

Nigerian Prince scams are also known, yet people still fall for them.

I actually had no idea the site was a scam. On the other hand, I have absolutely zero interest in a dating website, let alone one focused entirely on furries (no offense meant to anyone).

As for the 419 Scam knowledge, it's, generally, a combination of wide-eyed compassion or greed, an unexpected wrapper (It's never a prince anymore) and a massive sample size. Hundreds of messages sent by hundreds of people at most hours of the day. You're gonna hit a sucker eventually, especially since they're less likely to expect it.

Nympheon_Gang~ said:
For months

The Furfling and Furrymate ads have been on e621 for years.
Sure they're shitty "services" to advertise, but a furry mostly-porn website isn't exactly prime real estate for more mainstream advertisers, and the servers have gotta eat.

I'm mostly just glad e621 doesn't allow ad scripts.

Not super concerned about the site being a scam as it seems to be primarily targeting 18-30 year-olds, who should know better by now.

I'm just wondering if they're still using artwork without permission to make avatars for their bots.

It is only a scam if you actually send money to another user. It is effective if you don't actually have any money to spend. ;-) Soon as I see something with a payment requirement, such as "free trial" etc, I'm off.

rhyolite said:
It is effective if you don't actually have any money to spend.

But you actively can't do anything you'd expect from a dating site without giving the site money.

MagnusEffect said:
But you actively can't do anything you'd expect from a dating site without giving the site money.

Exactly. ;-)