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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Not sure how many people were around four years ago for the original drama, but @[email protected] was a banned user from early on the site's history, and I've seen quite a bit of speculation recently that a current frequent poster in c/mutualaid is an alt of hers due to having a similar MO and personal details (such as them both living in the same city)

For context, u/storyofrachel was an unhoused trans woman, who frequently solicited money from the community and had problems with substance abuse. She eventually made a post bragging about scamming money from users here (I myself was one of the users who sent her money) and blowing it on drugs (with a picture of the drugs in question) and a

bunch of homophobic slurs (TW: homophobia, self harm).
She later claimed that her account had been hacked, which frankly I did and do not believe. She was unbanned but later banned for other shit which I don't recall and am unable to reconstruct from the modlog and came back on a bunch of different alts, all of which were banned.

If there's any truth to this, it is deeply fucked that this person is still here, evading her ban and scamming people four years later. As one of the people who was taken advantage of previously (and, possibly, again with this current user!), people should at least be able to make an informed decision with all available context. If we want this community to function, and I say this as someone who has sent hundreds of dollars to people over the years through this community, we should be able to guard against bad actors who are trying to take advantage of the compassion and generosity of our user base.

Edit: There's an Instagram with both usernames on it, publicly available. It's 100% the same person. Not going to post it because I don't want anyone to get doxxed but yeah.

Edit edit: I'm going to go touch grass now. Anyone who is being willfully obtuse about why I made this post can read it again or any of my other comments in this thread

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[-] [email protected] 55 points 11 months ago

That was always the problem with /r/snackexchange and the other real-world subreddits I tried to make. 95%+ of the time it works as intended but without some kind of extra safety step there are people who have no problem punching down or sideways. We were never willing to do top-down user verification due to the privacy concern but that was the essential step that we would have needed. c/mutual_aid is going to have those same pitfalls as the site gets larger, especially if people hear about this place before they do Hexbear more broadly.

[-] [email protected] 43 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

lol, i always wondered what happened to her. i can’t believe A) its been 4 years and b) i never heard the story of how she got banned

her posts always irked me. even taking them at face value and not being skeptical of her intentions, i was confused at why the community kept rallying around someone who constantly sabotaged herself so much. she’s not someone who is ever going to stop using, because deep down she doesn’t have the desire to.

[-] [email protected] 57 points 11 months ago

"Getting someone to stop using" shouldn't be the goal of anyone here looking to do mutual aid online. There are specialized services that help with that and if you want to help people stop using go work with or volunteer at those services.

The goal here should be to keep people alive long enough to make the choice for themselves to seek the help they need. Assuming they even have access to those services, which many unhoused folks with addictions do not or cannot access those services for various reasons.

You aren't going to get someone to stop an addiction by posting at them. All you can do is help them stay alive long enough to hopefully choose to find help

[-] [email protected] 40 points 11 months ago

It's so gross and protestant brained when people look at mutual aid and direct giving like they're somehow morally responsible for trying to fix or control a person's behavior. Like yeah they might spend the money you give on shit that won't directly benefit them, sorry we live in such a sad, fascist society that one more good feeling seems more productive than attempting to get out of a bad situation. We're just trying to keep people alive, not perform rehab.

[-] [email protected] 70 points 11 months ago

I don't ask for receipts when I give someone cash, but them not coming on here bragging about scamming me, calling me slurs, and then asking for more money is a reasonable ask, I think

[-] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago

yeah i'm not really commenting about your post, just that other poster's attitude about mutual aid. obviously people who are bigoted opportunists that take all the air away are not welcome.

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[-] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago

i didn’t ‘post at’ her. i politely ignored her and hoped others would wisen up and do the same. i only started passing judgement out loud when i found out 4 years later that my gut instinct was more or less correct, and she’d gone down in flames because of it

[-] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago

she’s not someone who is ever going to stop using, because deep down she doesn’t have the desire to.

I have a hard time wrapping my head around this issue. addiction really alters your neurochemistry such that you behave and think in ways you otherwise might not. Some people say your "true self" is revealed when you're on substances, i.e. if you become an asshole you were really just an asshole all along, unlikely to ever change, and not deserving of additional chances, while other people say you "become someone else" on substances, not liable for your actions, and fundamentally absent from reality for the duration of the substance's effects, and I think neither of those ways of thinking is exactly correct for substance abuse, anymore than it is for medication, especially given the variety of substances and the different interactions they have with our brains and bodies, which aren't even consistent each time we use them, but highly dependent on stuff like mood, food intake, etc... Fundamentally, it's a shame that someone took advantage of a mutual aid community, thereby decreasing its effectiveness. That's really the heart of it. Whether she's capable of change is more of a philosophical issue. u/happybadger made a good post in this thread about the pitfalls anonymous online mutual aid. You either sacrifice privacy or you sacrifice stability. You either make your users vulnerable to doxxing, or you make your community vulnerable to sabotage by bad actors. I'm wondering if there's a way to engineer a resolution to this so you can get the best of both options?

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[-] [email protected] 43 points 11 months ago

I hate all of this. What a fucked up and sad situation.

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[-] [email protected] 34 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

So as the person who apparently pointed this out to people, I have a few things I'd like to say here.

One, after I posted my previous comment, someone responded to me with more information which confirms that, yes, this is the same person. (I'm gonna be honest, I had assumed it was from pretty early on, given all the things that lined up, so that came as no real surprise to me.)

Two, whatever the story was behind Rachel's behavior years ago, I have never observed her saying anything unkind or inappropriate since her return to the site. As far as I can tell, she at least learned her lesson on that. I've been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, and it looks to me like she's made good on that trust and not been toxic like she was before--in spite of all this drama that has descended on her lately.

Three, and this one is pretty big for me: I have never caught her in a lie on here since she came back. Not once. And as people may have realized by now, I pay pretty close attention.

Seriously, consider her actions in recent weeks, and tell me if this sounds like scammer behavior: First, she voluntarily tells everyone she raised nearly $800 from a single post. There was absolutely zero reason to tell anyone that. Why on Earth would a scammer, whose whole scam depended on making people think they were desperate, tell people they had just received a windfall? And that is of course magnified by the post letting us all know about that $4k. No scammer with half a brain would tell us, and no scammer with even one brain cell would let on that they got so much money and then spent it all inside of a month's time. If anything, that proves to me that she's being honest, even to an arguable fault.

And I want to mention that I have caught at least one recipient of my largess here on Hexbear in a lie (it was an utterly pointless lie, too; I had already made clear I was going to provide this person with money, and they then lied to me to make it sound like they had better means to pay it back than they really did, even though I had not asked to be paid back in any way). I have not given that person any money since, even though they have made posts here requesting funds since then. Another user changed their original ask after someone sent them the amount they requested and said so in a comment, which really rubbed me the wrong way. I reported that to mods but never heard anything back, and the post stayed up, but I never donated to that user again either.

By contrast, Rachel made clear that she was spending the money on food, and honestly, I think the small-time donations really were used that way. But even if not, even if she did sometimes buy drugs with that money, well, you can't give money to a meth addict and expect them not to use it in ways you might not like. And I say that as someone who gave her upwards of $400, all told.

Is it disappointing that she didn't succeed in making her situation permanently better with that four grand? Absolutely, and it seems clear to me that she's more upset about that than we all are. But I don't really agree that her recent behavior makes her a "bad actor."

[-] [email protected] 38 points 11 months ago

Actually, misrepresenting herself as a new user and not a new account for someone who was banned quite some time ago is the original lie that you're missing here. I wouldn't have given money to someone who called me a f****t and bragged about scamming me in the past. That's the lie. It's nice you've absolved her, but I absolutely have not.

If it's her, as you say, she should be banned instantaneously from this site.

[-] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago

as a neutral observation i believe mentioning that you are the new account of a previously banned user is a bannable offense

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[-] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago

I mean you have to consider that the site mod culture seems to be that ban evading is kind of okay as long as it's not really discussed, but if they were to come back and say "hey this is me evading a ban," well, that's ban evasion

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[-] [email protected] 29 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

@[email protected] was a banned user from early on the site's history,

FYI that account's not actually banned.

[-] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Huh, you're right. But all her alts are still banned, mostly for ban evasion. Not sure what happened there

[-] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago

shrug-outta-hecks we don't know either

[-] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

This community has really been a life saver for me allowing me to get food for myself and my son when in a precarious situation. I’ve also given back to other users when I’ve had the means to do so.

It makes me sad to think that somebody would take advantage of the kindness of other users here; that said, it seems like this person is openly struggling with mental health and addiction issues and I have enough first hand and second hand experience with those things myself to know how giving thousands of dollars lump sum to somebody in the middle of it is going to go. I guess I don’t have much useful advice to give here, I just wanted to comment to add another voice in agreement with the other users that this comm is such an important resource and I hope that this incident doesn’t scare people off of donating altogether. Seems like it’d be hard to implement more security without making it harder to donate or receive donations. It’s probably a good idea to check post history before giving and decide for yourself whether giving money to any individual person is the kind of help they really need.

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[-] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago

Oh yeah, I remember reading a lot of that. Has it really been four years since. It's amazing how time flies so fast.

[-] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago

Nobody is forcing anyone to give to anyone else here and now that there's a block button for users it's even less important to ban people imo. If someone wants to give money to the person constantly complaining their life is a mess because they do too much meth then more power to them, I just block and move on 🤷

[-] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Isn't there a point where you just become an enabler though? I don't know if you can OD on meth, but if someone abused heroine and a community financed that abuse until the user OD'ed, wouldn't that kind of be on the community?

I'm genuinely asking by the way, not trying to do some weird debate thing of thinking up some odd hypothetical or some shitty rhetorical framing in order to shame people for helping. The example is just to explain my thought process.

I expect it's the kinda thing that doesn't have a clear answer, but I feel like there's also people who know a lot more than me about mutual aid, who will have a much better answer.

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[-] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago

The whole situation is just incredibly sad and was only ever going to end in tears after the large donations. You'd have to be very naive to think otherwise. Honestly I'm just happy that Rachel is still alive.

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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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