A Guide to Safe Conduct at the Masquerade

Almost every intimate-space scam runs the same four moves, in order. Learning the shape once protects you everywhere.

1. The invented person. A profile with borrowed photos and a life story tuned to you. On most apps, nothing checks that the person exists at all. They move fast because a fake identity costs them nothing.

2. The rush. Love-bombing, urgency, and reciprocity: they share something intimate first, so you feel you owe one back. Real people are rarely in a hurry. Manufactured intimacy always is.

3. The pull."Add me on Telegram" or "let's move to Snap." The pull has one purpose: getting you somewhere with no verification, no consent controls, and no help desk. Declining to move a conversation is not rude. It is the single cheapest protection you have.

4. The turn. Once they hold something intimate of yours, the tone flips: pay, or it goes to your family, your employer, your followers. This is sextortion. It is a crime nearly everywhere, it is epidemic, and it works through panic, not technology.

These habits hold on any platform, including this one.

Share only with someone whose identity you have a real reason to trust. Keep your face, tattoos, and identifying backgrounds out of anything you would not defend in daylight. Never let anyone rush you: no real person needs your photo tonight. Keep intimate conversations where protections exist rather than where they end. And know that a request to move platforms, a sudden sob story about a broken camera, or a link you did not ask for are each, on their own, reason enough to stop.

At Masque specifically: everyone you meet passed an independent 18+ identity check, nobody here knows your legal name unless you tell them, and nothing arrives without your consent. Those are architectural facts, not promises about character. A verified adult can still be cruel. Calibrate trust to the person, not the badge.

If someone threatens to share your intimate images, the next hour matters more than the next month. Sextortion succeeds through panic and isolation. Break both.

Do not pay. Payment never ends it. It marks you as someone who pays.

Do not comply with demands for more images. That deepens the leverage, never releases it.

Do not delete anything. Screenshots, usernames, payment demands, and timestamps are evidence. Preserve the conversation exactly as it is.

Report and block.On Masque, use Report on the conversation: the report preserves a snapshot as evidence and blocking is immediate. Off Masque, use the platform's own reporting first.

Bring in real help. These services exist for exactly this and are free:

• StopNCII.org creates hashes of your images so partner platforms can block them before they spread. Your images never leave your device.
• NCMEC Take It Down does the same for anyone whose images were taken while under 18, at any age now.
• FBI IC3 takes reports of online extortion in the United States. Elsewhere, your national police cybercrime unit does.

United States federal law now requires covered platforms to run a 48-hour removal process for intimate images shared without consent, including realistic AI forgeries. Masque's removal process is at masque.chat/legal/takedown and works for everyone, account or not.

Verification proves that every person at the ball is a real adult who passed an independent identity check, one account per person. It does not certify anyone's character or intentions.

Consent controls mean nothing is delivered to you without your acceptance: no request, no message, no image. They do not control what someone does with what you choose to send them.

We cannot prevent screenshots, and we will never tell you otherwise. What we do instead: preserved evidence on every report, a trained review process, instant blocking, and a removal process that works with or without an account.

You owe nobody a reply, an explanation, or your name. That is the whole point of the mask.