I can’t believe I was finally chosen

  • dbtng@eviltoast.orgEnglish
    20·
    7 days ago

    Ok, this is a shitpost community. I should not expect a real answer here. But I’m gonna float this question and see what people say.

    This person has (of course) spammed me multiple times from apparently (just?) 2 different accounts now. [email protected] [email protected]

    Ok. So its spam. I block it. But what on earth is going on? This doesn’t seem to make sense. I assume somebody has actually tried to talk to this Nicole person. How did that go?

    • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      20·
      6 days ago

      There’s a community for pondering this question.

      The consensus is that Nicole is actually being harassed.

      If you follow the links there’s no one to talk to but in the topic for the matrix room or something it says where she works.

      So it’s something like creepy weirdo is spamming everyone with her photo in the hope that creeps from lemmy go hit on her at her work.

    • Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee
      42·
      6 days ago

      I think they eventually try to get you onto a crypto trading platform or something.

  • rosco385@lemm.eeEnglish
    8·
    6 days ago

    ❝Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Fediverse is. You have to see it for yourself. This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You toke from the blue bong, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You toke the red bong, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes… Remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more… Follow me… on Friendica❞

    • wabafee@lemmy.world
      1·
      6 days ago

      Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole

    • Nurse_Robot@lemmy.worldOP
      15·
      7 days ago

      Most likely, no one knows for sure. Random accounts will spam this message, and the picture keeps changing. No one knows who this girl is, or if she knows her image is being used. There’s speculation about where the photos are originating from

      • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        32·
        6 days ago

        Just copying my other comment…

        There’s a community for pondering this question.

        The consensus is that Nicole is actually being harassed.

        If you follow the links there’s no one to talk to but in the topic for the matrix room or something it says where she works.

        So it’s something like creepy weirdo is spamming everyone with her photo in the hope that creeps from lemmy go hit on her at her work.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      6·
      6 days ago

      I don’t think anyone has gotten to the bottom of it. It’s a scam that has been sweeping Lemmy, Mbin and Mastodon (possibly others) for awhile now. It features a picture of that girl, we’ve seen several different pictures, it’s the same girl and they’re just about always posed as if it’s a frame from a Skype call or Zoom meeting like that. At first, the picture would show up with the text as plaintext, it has mutated and now the text is baked into the image to get around spam filters. At some point the message started asking for crypto.

      It’s pretty obviously a spam/scam/spcam, so it’s become a little bit of an in-joke, receiving one is something of a rite of passage, and referring to the almost certainly fictional character of Nicole as “our” girlfriend.

      Exactly what scam it’s pulling isn’t clear. I’ve seen several hypotheses put forward:

      • It’s just asking for crypto. Simple “Look at girl. Think with dick. Send bitcoin.” plot
      • It’s a pig butchering scam. A long-term confidence trick where the scammer actually befriends you for months at a time, then convinces you to “invest” in legit looking shady shit. Designed to get around defenses that were built up against the Nigerian Prince scam.
      • It’s a harassment campaign against the girl in the photos. Which…this is the most diabolical and circuitous way I can think of achieving that. "We have several screenshots of this girl on Zoom calls. We’ll spam Lemmy, not Reddit or Twitter or Instagram, Lemmy, as if she’s inviting people to join a Matrix chat to socialize, and then these nerds will pull a Cicada 3301 job of following the breadcrumbs to finding the actual girl and annoying/attacking her. This is the most G-rated revenge porn campaign I’ve ever seen.
      • It’s for de-anonymizing Lemmy accounts. I’m not enough of a nerd to know how the nuts and bolts of this one works but I think they send you a DM that links to a jpeg stored on another server, they send a slightly different jpeg to each account they’re targeting, and which IP address requests which jpeg can pin an IP address to a Lemmy account. A lot of the mainstream web falling to fascism you can see why Big They might want to see who’s who on the platform that still allows subversive ideas like “genocide is bad”.

      It’s come from accounts made on several instances, I think at least one instance specifically for the purpose but a few random accounts with no post history started blasting it out on several instances including sh.itjust.works. So whoever’s behind it is pretty persistent.

      • dbtng@eviltoast.orgEnglish
        1·
        6 days ago

        Ok. Thanks for the extended perspective.

        Just today I tried to get some info from graphics stored on a lemmy server and found them to be highly anonymized. I’m gonna guess you have to engage with a potential scammer in order for them to extract data, and just viewing the message gives them nothing. Lemmy probly has security flaws, but seems well designed as far as I’ve looked.

        Ya, I getcha that if its harassment, its really weird harassment. But if its harassment of a real person out there, I certainly don’t want to be part of it. I haven’t been on lemmy very long. I’ve already tangled with one batshit crazy person. I’m fully willing to believe that more exist.