Universal Scammer List

With the festive season coming up many subs are planning or discussing exchanges, giveaways, contests, as well as those that often do trading or gifting. If your sub is considering one of these festive activities then an essential tool for you is the Universal Scammer List.

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From the USL team:

The USL is a joint-effort between 60+ subreddits - each participating subreddit allows the USLBot access to their moderator log and permission to ban/unban users on their subreddit. A simplification of what is done with this information is as follows: The USLBot tracks any bans that the subreddit makes and saves them locally. If the ban note (which is only visible to moderators on the subreddit) contains certain keywords (typically #scammer) the USLBot will ban the user on all participating subreddits.

We do have criteria for a subreddit to be able to participate in order to maintain the integrity of the list which can be found HERE.

Even if the subreddit doesn't meet our requirements, our scammer list is 100% public. You can search for any username on our website to check to see if they have been banned. We also have API access, which you can mod-mail us for more information.

We also have worked with Reddit Shopping Tool / Reddit Scam Labeler to integrate the bot with it. Users running a Chrome based browser can install this tool which can be found HERE. It puts a red scammer tag next to their username. We don't run/develop this extension (made by a 3rd party) but it runs off our banlist. This is particularly beneficial to users and mods who are on non-USL protected subreddits as they can avoid them or ban them from the specific subreddits.

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Personally I use the Reddit Scam Labeller and check any user names before I do any trades or anything of that nature on reddit. While these tools will not help you to prevent every scammer it will help you in filtering out many of them.

Using this in conjunction with advising your sub users on scammers and common potential scams means that you can help to keep your users as safe as possible and give everyone the best chance to have a great experience.

The best mantra is - If it seems too good to be true, it generally is.