None of these are sophisticated. They keep working because they arrive at the moment you are least likely to check anything.
The scams here are old. They survive because they are aimed at people who are not in a checking mood.
1. Payment outside the platform
Someone asks you to send money by gift card, crypto, a payment app, anything that is not the platform's own checkout. The reason offered is always plausible: fees, a discount, "the platform takes 20%".
Every payment made outside the platform is unrecoverable and unsupported. There is no dispute process because there was no transaction the platform can see. This one rule kills most of the list below.
2. The free trial link
A link promising a free trial for a page that is not free. It leads to a copy of the login screen, and what it collects is your credentials.
Real trial links are generated inside the platform and live on the platform's own domain. A login page reached from a link someone sent you is a login page you should not use. Go to the site yourself and search for the creator.
3. Impersonation
A copy of a real creator's photos, name and bio, on a different account. It is not always obvious, because the original content is genuine, just stolen.
Signals worth checking: a username that is a near-miss of the real one, a page with very few likes carrying content that clearly took years to build, and a bio pushing you somewhere else immediately.
We index public profiles as we find them and we do not verify identity. If you find an impersonation in our catalog, report it and a human reads it.
4. The girlfriend script
Long, warm, personal-sounding messages that build toward a request. Sometimes it is a paid unlock, sometimes it is an emergency needing money off-platform.
Most inbox messages on large pages are broadcasts, written once and sent to everyone. A message can use your name and still have been sent to four thousand people. Judge the ask, not the warmth.
The one rule
If a request moves money or credentials off the platform, it is a scam. That covers all four of these and most of what is not on this list.
What we do at our end
We show public profile data and link you to the real page. We take no payments and hold no accounts, so there is nothing here to phish. Removal requests go through the DMCA page.
Figures pulled from the OnlyLocus catalog on August 19, 2026, covering all 182,191 published profiles.
Keep reading
Safety and rules
The creator does not see your card. Your bank does see a charge. Between those two facts sits everything people worry about, and most of it is manageable.
Safety and rules
9,259 profiles in our catalog have crossed a hundred thousand likes. Some of them have not posted since 2024, and the like count will never tell you which.
Safety and rules
A subscription is a recurring charge with a real card. These five checks take about a minute and prevent most of the ways this goes wrong.
