In terms of "grifting online" here's quite a few types and quite a few methods.
Video essay/review type grifters: 4 hour long videos for shit that has barely any content aside from bare minimum shit and looping talking points. Generally they work alone but there's some that are in cliques like breadtube. the swindling here is time and not actually gaining any considerable knowledge. Also money though optional but people like that make BANK for some absurd reason.
Artists/game devs/generalized project grifters: announce something, take a shitload of money for it, only to funnel the money into other shit instead and then claim harassment when people ask what happened with the project they paid for, going completely dark for months to years on end but also begging for more money to "stop the harassers" or some dumb shit sometimes before doing so. Idiots pay them thousands. There are MANY cases of this shit but one Big infamous case of this kinda grift is KONY 2012, though it's an outlier fromt he standard due to the fact I don't think it did the harassment claim shit and instead just skipped right to going dark and running off with the money. The swindling is the lack of a finalized product and wasted money.
Scam service sponsorship/eceleb grifters: There's a manipulative aspect to these, they aren't the main problem so much as the dishonest companies payrolling them to act a certain way. There's of course the blatantly scripted "raid shadowlegends" sponsor shit where they HAVE to list off game features and go "my favorite game mode is the arena where you-" I'm not willing to recite the whole thing, but that's like the most benign one compared to the other shit that's happened online with this kind of grift. Betterhelp and Candid are the 2 go to ones for the more insidious kind of companies in terms of this kind of grift. For those dthat don't reember, Candid was a chat/forum site app thing that was being promoted by various polular youtube people years ago. The thing is each of them had a different script to advertise it depending on what political leaning their audience was thought to be. People that criticized the sus behavior had all of them going after them in unison more or less false flagging and shit. In the end the thing turned out to be a censorship ai training site that once they thought it was good enough they shut it down and the grifter in charge of the operation got a cushy job at amazon. Betterhelp, a thing I STILL see occasional sponsors for, when it initially became a thing the sponsors had little "plotlines" of very blatantly acted and fake depression, meltdowns or breakdowns of a sort. General theatrics of mental instability, only to suddenly be better in the video they were shilling betterhelp in. If it weren't for that aspect betterhelp would be amongst translifeline in terms of grifts rather than candid. The swindling here is obvious, the people getting fucked are the ones who don't notice the sus shit fast enough and end up getting their info yoinked.
There's more kinds of internet grifting like eTHOTS and shit but if I keep going like this we're gonna be here all night.
