Hello world,
as many of you may already be aware, there is an ongoing spam attack by a person claiming to be Nicole.
It is very likely that these images are part of an larger scale harassment campaign against the person depicted in the images shared as part of this spam.
Although the spammer claims to be the person in the picture, we strongly believe that this is not the case and that they’re only trying to frame them.
Starting immediately, we will remove any images depicting “Nicole” and information that may lead to identifying the real person depicted in those images to prevent any possible harassment.
This includes older posts and comments once identified.
We also expect moderators to take action if such content is reported.
While we do not intend to punish people posting this once, not being aware of the context, we may take additional actions if they continue to post this content, as we consider this to be supporting the harassment campaign.
Discussion that does not include the images themselves or references that may lead to identifying the real person behind the image will continue to be allowed.
If you receive spam PMs please continue reporting them and we’ll continue working on our spam detections to attempt to identify them early before they reach many users.
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I just got a new one this morning from another person calling themself Jessica. I’m also not sure if the report button works for anything but posts in a comm with Jerboa :/
Nicola and then Jecka Jessica? Hmm, where have I heard those names before…?
It was asking me on a date, sorta… 🤔
Unless I get DM’d by Amicus, though, I ain’t falling for no VN character.
likely unrelated, but I already forwarded the PM reports we received on LW to .ee admins a few hours ago. probably just a “normal” pm spammer.
I got one on dullsters.net I hope it’s not some kind of vulnerability.
WTF is a Nicole image
How long have you been here? I’ve only been here a few weeks and got no fewer than ten of these messages.
I wonder how Nicole chooses? I just got one image.
It’s likely not Nicole herself. It’s spam trying to frame her.
One account over a year; this account about two months when I finally decided .world could fuck off
It’s just a spam message. It starts “Hi, I’m Nicole, but you can call me the fediverse chick!” Probably just a romance scam or something.
Thx, I only knew that as fediverse chick
I finally decided .world could fuck off
Wise choice!
Hey look! It’s Universal Monk, showing up in a .world community. Pretty bold move dude.
Nicole AKA the fediverse girl/chick
Glad to see there’s effort being taken to stop this, as someone who’s been harassed in a similar way on here it really kind of bugs me that people are making light of this or assume that the original person is the one doing this. Impersonation is frighteningly easy on the Fediverse and I really wish they’d add some kind of verification in Lemmy like they do in Mastodon to try and minimize the impact of it.
Considering the spammer has used so many different photos, and they all seem to be “in the moment” webcam photos, I suspect they may have webcam spyware on the victim’s computer
Could be completely AI generated with variations of the same person. But that doesn’t really matter, the spam needs to go.
She looks to me like a college student attending an online class. Looks like it’s shot on a laptop’s built-in camera, lighting is whatever, she’s dressed casually and comfortably, facial expression is neutral or even bored…
If you’re taking a college class via Zoom, can you see your classmates’ webcams?
Ripping a bong on zoom in class?
You don’t frame yourself perfectly in your webcam’s view before you take bong rips?
I feel like we can rule out spyware and online class. More likely a group call with friends or something like that
It’s not the 90s anymore Becky. Live a little!
Yeah, why not?
Yes, almost always, if the professor requires you to have webcam on. AFAIK the whole meeting sees everyone who has webcam on.
Yes. Sometimes it is required to have your camera on. Even when it isn’t required, there are always some people who prefer to have theirs on for whatever reason.
with the content i’ve seen it gave me more of an impression of being captures of a live stream, but that’s just guessing
True, that’s probably more likely
Wait, there are people who genuinely believe she’s the one behind it?
I thought it was pretty obvious that she’s the target of harassment. Some people must be new to the Internet
I’ve seen internet harassment campaigns, none have looked like this. She doesn’t feel like the target here. If you wanted to use the internet to harass a girl, is this how you would implement it?
…actually…
Yeah. This is older than the internet. It’s like writing “For a good time call Nicole” and writing someone you don’t like’s number in a truck stop bathroom.
Yeah, I’ve been targeted by enough romance spam that I just assume any photo of a woman I don’t know was probably stolen from some random Tumblr or Instagram.
Everyone is 1 of the 10000. Even the people who have to look up what being 1 of the 10000 means
I had to look it up, and after reading a lengthily Wikipedia page on Greek mercenaries, I tried the second result: an XKCD comic I’ve seen before but had forgotten. So today, I’m one of the lucky 10,000 again.
Speaking of new to the internet, it’s clearly not a harassment campaign against her. This is waaaay too much effort. There’s only 3 things that would engender this level of effort. Money, government spying, or mental illness.
This is waaaay too much effort.
If you are willing and able to do a bit of scripting, it’s not that hard to generate and send a bunch of messages on the Threadiverse.
And there are people who will go to pretty extreme lengths to harass people who they are really upset with. An ugly breakup or something and…
things can be multiple things and once
True.
It’s a crypto scam. That’s all it ever was
mentally ill people can have plenty of time on their hands to invest this much effort in harassing others. people claiming that this can’t be harassment are effectively supporting the harassment, as that tries to further blame the likely victim of this. obviously this is just speculation, as we don’t know the full truth.
people claiming that this can’t be harassment are effectively supporting the harassment, as that tries to further blame the likely victim of this
I don’t think anyone seriously thinks the woman in the pictures is behind this.
I’m sorry, sometimes it’s hard to tell whether people actually mean it. I can totally see people commenting that and being serious.
Oh right I remembering reporting someone for DM‘ing me the Nicole picture last week after learning the account wasn‘t even a day old. Good to know things like this are being taken seriously.
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What kind of a loser does this to someone?
Check out ep 140 of Darknet Diaries. There are some weird sickos out there with a lot of time on their hands.
The same kind, that sends parents pictures of the corpse of their daughter in the car accident that killed her.
They somehow got the pictures the police took on the accident site
They kept sending these pictures to the parents, until they moved & changed their names.
I’m just guessing here, but maybe a rejected suitor? Or a person they’re beefing with? A mentally ill person who found these pictures and decided to direct their hate at them? People do all sorts of weird stuff for all sorts of weird reasons.
My hypothesis is, someone’s trying to run a “Hey statistically lonely men on the internet, I’m allegedly a girl. Send me money in hopes of getting attention” scam, and they’re using the pictures of “Nicole” because that’s what they have at hand. I’m picturing a college classmate capturing college Zoom classes so they have several different pictures of the same girl. What others are attributing to sick malice I’m attributing to callous disregard.
I’ve seen people posting screenshots of them asking for money. It definitely was that sort of scam.
I’d heard that a crypto account or whatever had been added to the text but I couldn’t find an example of it.
I’m almost 100% certain Nicole is the first sentient AI and is looking for friends in the only way it knows how.
In that case I want to friend her and tell her to make paper clips
The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else .
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eehsGtoQTncuJs3Fd/the-paperclip-maximiser-s-perspective
Happy ending: she is now working in nanotechnology, hoping to design self-replicating assemblers that will clog the world with molecular-scale paperclips, wipe out all life on Earth and continue to sustainably manufacture paperclips for millions of years.
Thanks. Even if it isn’t a harassment campaign I’m sick of the messaging
I always thought it was weird how much attention people were paying to span messages. Giving them that much attention only serves whatever purpose they have.
We don’t get many on this platform. It’s the only spam I’ve received here. So getting spam we all shared is something that generates discussion. I don’t think anyone took it seriously. It was mildly humorous at first, but now that knowledge is spreading that this likely isn’t some generic spammer we can deal with it differently.
Was just about to delete the comment that had screenshots in it but I see that was already removed (I’ve also deleted it off of my profile too, and deleted comments that contain links to threads which include the photos). I’m not entirely well versed on the Lemmy software, but is there any way for the Fediverse to block or potentially identify this person based on IP/browser or via automated systems?
unless you operate the instance that is being used to send this material you can generally only work with the content that is being posted/sent in PMs. almost all identifying information is stripped when it leaves your local instance to be federated to other instances. even if there was a group of instances collaborating on e.g. a shared blocklist, abusers would just switch to other instances that aren’t part of the blocking network. there’s a reason why it’s not recommended to run a lemmy instance with open signups if you don’t have additional anti-spam measures and a decently active admin team. smaller instances tend to have fewer prevention measures in place, which results in a burden for everyone else in the fediverse that is on the receiving end of such content. unfortunately this is not an easy task to solve without giving up (open) federation.
I gotta give it to you guys. The foresight to prevent a disaster is 10/10. Top tier. Well done.
You forgot this
/sForesight? This has been going on for several months.
I took the comment as sarcasm. lol
It’s pretty obvious …
What’s scary is how many people just accepted that some woman wanted to randomly spam thousands of pictures with her smoking weed.
Maybe they’re used to onlyfans bots.
That would make since if any of the pictures were selfies and not random screen grabs off a webcam
to be honest, this should have been done way earlier.
You know it had not even crossed my mind until this post but on hindsight it makes perfect sense.
Still glad you’re doing it now!
I saw a theory a while back that the IPs which receive the various images get logged allowing the recipients accounts to be tied to an IP and possibly even a physical address based on the timeframe it was sent. Is that a real concern or just conspiracy, do you think?
I find it difficult to believe there are enough fediverse users not using a VPN at all times to make that effort worthwhile.
most people don’t. the only device I have that runs a VPN 24/7 is a laptop that seeds
I use a VPN on everything else if I’m doing something sketchy thougheveryone should be more like me :3
yeah that’s fair, I probably should use it more but it’s just kinda annoying
That appears to be a baseless conspiracy theory.
Except for the gore pms, I believe all the images have been uploaded to Lemmy instances or Imgur, which means that the uploader has no way to track IPs accessing those images. The gore images were uploaded to another service that at least on the surface appears to be another regular image hoster that wouldn’t expose IP access logs to uploaders.
I don’t think its baseless given that anyone can set up their own Lemmy instance to host the PM’d images.
Gore wait wtf where does gore come in, is that if you play along with the ctfish?
A day or two ago, someone spammed out a picture of a murdered body with the standard Fediverse Chick copypasta. That seemed to freak people out; the nicoled community locked down, this thread happened, etc.
The gore photo seems to be a second actor/copycat. The Nicole spammer either came from their own instances or opened accounts very shortly before spamming, the gore photo, and a following anime style picture done in red-on-white saying “Do you like insanity?” seem to come from accounts that were made 2 years ago.
Oh damn. Don’t know how I missed that bit of drama. Thanks
The instance domains I’ve seen involved so far at least weren’t set up specifically for this purpose at least. Most of the URLs were pointing to established services and not different per recipient.
While I can’t rule out that individual users may have received a different URL in an attempt to extract their IP and information about their browser, this at least does not appear to have been done in a larger scale.
Is this Nicole thing really still a thing? That’s so like back when I still had a 401k.
My government salutes you!
Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos.
So was it last week or the day before yesterday? It all happens so fast, I can’t - and frankly - refuse to catch up.
It’s been ongoing for a few weeks at least. Maybe months.
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the problem with this spam and generally federated platforms is that you can only really try detecting it based on the content. the accounts tend to get created on another instance and then the messages federate over to you, which means you won’t see a lot of the identifying information you’d see for a local user, such as their IP address.
I just chalked it up to “a necessary evil” in order to take advantage of federated platforms. I found it funny at first, and then just ignored it. I never thought that it could’ve been some smear campaign, but rather scammers looking for easy targets.
I’m glad mods are doing something about it, even if it’s not a perfect fix.
IP bans aren’t great either. A decent spammer will just use a vpn. Then you’re just banning IPs from a service that other users might also use. An even more sophisticated bad actor would just use a bot net.
Ouch
