DM funnel.

What it looks like

The DM funnel is one of the most common high-risk Reddit mechanics and one of the most efficient: the actual pitch never happens on a public thread, so moderators and skeptical bystanders cannot review it. The trap is two-step: a public post softens the hook, then individual conversations close the deal in private.

On Reddit this looks like a post that's emotionally interesting, technically vague, and ends with some flavor of "DM me for details" or "I'll send you the link." The replies from supposedly-curious strangers are warm and short and ask for the DM too. None of those accounts exist to talk about anything else.

How the scanner catches it

• The scanner extracts every comment whose text contains "DM me," "PM me," "send you the link," "shoot me a message," or "already DM'd OP" and surfaces them at the top of the report.
• Commenters who only ever say variants of those phrases — and almost never engage on any other topic — get account-history flagged as single-purpose accounts.
• Reply-graph rings inside the thread (small cliques where accounts only talk to each other, not to outside skeptics) get drawn explicitly.

Surface markers

Exact phrases and patterns the scanner reads as evidence. These aren’t sufficient on their own — a real-person comment can sound this way too — but they push the verdict toward the pattern when they cluster with the structural flags above.

Where it shows up