Previous post, now removed: https://redd.it/d4pak4

ElectricalDay7 IS A REAL PERSON WITH NO ILL INTENTIONS

Feel free to make friends with her.

She reached out to me and modmail, we had a discussion, she provided verification, and I investigated her post history. The clear conclusion is that she is a real person, exactly who she says she is, and doesn't want anything more from people than friendship. The parallels between her behavior and the behavior of the past catfish are purely coincidental.

Sorry for the scare, everybody. Carry on, but do keep an eye out for actual catfish and scammers.

To address the most anticipated question right away: Why didn't you just ask for verification before removing her post!?

As you can imagine, the vast majority of deceivers don't really want to admit to their deception, so confrontations like that will be ignored or met with ignorance, avoidance, or defensiveness, but definitely not telling the truth or verifying or anything that would help the situation. They do tend to just keep doing what they're doing and hope to not get banned. We've tried the "ask questions first, shoot later" approach a long time ago, and as you may expect, it didn't work, forcing us to lean more towards the "shoot first, ask questions later" approach which has been much more effective. Real, genuine people will respond to that and will verify. Mods will unban and they'll be free to post as normal. Non-authentic people will try to convince, even seduce, mods to let them continue on without any form of explanation or verification, or they'll abandon/delete their current account and potentially fall back to any number of alts and throwaways. Fortunately, the karma/account life rule has been very effective in combating throwaway spam. But dedicated deceivers will create accounts, farm karma elsewhere for a couple days, then move to /r/r4r, and that's just what we have to deal with from time to time nowadays.