Comment by kayodelycaon
3 years ago
One that I've run into several times is suicide. Most of the time, the person isn't in immediate danger. I've been around when people were.
I'm not going to go into any detail for people's privacy, but it took over an hour to figure out who a regular member of a community was in real life and then get emergency services in another country to them. Got independent confirmation they got dragged to a hospital in time. They weren't exactly grateful afterwards, but they stayed in the community and didn't repeat the attempt.
Faked requests for situations like this are routinely and frequently used for harassment/attempted murder in gaming. Unless this is solvable, this is rather problematic and dangerous.
Maybe I should have clarified, I don’t act on the vast majority of things in this manner, especially when I don’t know the person or the circumstances. Unless I have some method of confirmation, escalating to emergency services is not happening. Even then, it’s last resort for precisely this reason.