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 a 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’ve been thinking this since it started and saying it for a bit. I don’t understand at all how there were memes of this on the front page all the time and it took this long to do even this. Has there been any attempt at an effort to notify whoever is in the picture that this is happening? I would like to help if possible.
might make sense to notify the educational institution she was said to be attending.
I think “notify her” feeds the harassment they’re referring to, even if contacting her is well intended
I mean depending how its handled and on context, yes of course, but I’m not suggesting we traumatize this person further than whatever has already happened. Like someone else said letting the university is a decent first step.
I saw some disturbing pics of someone posing as Nicole. Reported it for gore, spam, Nicole.
oh damn, was that on Lemmy? I haven’t heard/seen anything other than it just being casual photos in a house
Yup… Forgot the instance I just reported and blocked that user cause that’s all they were commenting.
I wonder if you could create a comment spam catch. If you’re commenting the same content in different places or something.
I’ve been lurking in ALL for about a week pretty consistently having now completely abandoned the alternatives and I’m not sure I saw the image in question. In fact, I’m pretty sure I didn’t. So, those of you worried about the image… many of us, I presume, didn’t even see it. Anyway… glad to see there is a process to deal with miscreance and glad to know it works!
They were sent via direct messages so you just didn’t happen to get a DM from them.
Thanks! It was getting bad.
They are not stopping the messages, just removing posts with her picture other people have shared.
I have no context for this and thought it was an April fools joke left up but no, this is a real problem here?
I think I’ve gotten about 5 messages in total. Multiply that across the fediverse, and that’s potentially a lot of irritation.
I just got my first one a couple days ago so yeah. It’s pretty widespread.
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.
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…
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.
It’s a crypto scam. That’s all it ever was
things can be multiple things and once
True.
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.
Thank you, as someone who looked into this I am glad to see this being taken seriously. The real Nicole is for sure a victim and does not deserve to be doxxed and made into a meme.
Echoing everyone else in that it seemed kind of funny at first but that it has just turned weirder.
I think it’s a good call. I will report if I receive any messages.
Yeah it seemed funny at first but the longer this went on the creepier it got as we all realized this isn’t just a catfish.
Whoever is doing this to the actual person in the photos is a terrible human being and should go climb under a rock for the rest of their lives.
Agreed. When the images started to change it got really creepy.
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It’s just creepy because in every other obvious scam like this for the last 10 years they use the same single picture of the same person on everyone. Now suddenly there are dozens of different pictures, all clearly of the same woman, going to different people.
I’ve seen several different images and there was a video on peertube. All of them look like content from a hacked webcam.
Yeah, that’s what I thought from the very first DM I received. It looks like Shea totally unaware a picture was taken of her. Surely, if this were real, “Nicole” would use a more flattering picture to potential friends.
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It got super creepy when more shots of this women were released of her doing activities that no one would ever take a photo of themselves doing. Then the last photo was released separately of a NSFW don’t read if you are not in a place to read gore/graphic/assault
Tap for spoiler
Real photo of a dead woman who looks like Nicole in a morgue body bag with her flesh peeled off and her face beaten. It’s unlikely that this disturbing turn is real but it was horrific for people who received this last spam. That is what triggered the ultimate ban on all images (since this is most likely a psychopathic copycat). :(
Weird, I’d assumed it was just AI generated? What makes people think it’s harassment?
What makes people think it’s harassment?
It’d make a lot of sense to me.
The image quality was poor, and there are AI models that permit one to create absolutely stunningly attractive people, moreso than real photos. Hell, I’ve written scripts myself to automatically drive Stable Diffusion to produce bulk procedural images. Anyone capable of scripting up a bot to send the message in the first place is more than capable of scripting up better generation.
For catfishing, sending multiple duplicate messages to a user, which happened in this case, seems unlikely to be a goal.
I assumed that it couldn’t reasonably be a scam attempt, so was guessing at it being a deanonymization effort, but harassment would make even more sense. If you’re trying to drive lots of angry people to make the victim miserable, it doesn’t matter if the images are annoying — in fact, it only makes them more effective, since hopefully you get more irate users sending material to the victim.
Anyone that is monolithic in a space without broad scope comments and presence is fake or potentially dangerous. No one would be posting in Lemmy, in this context of supposed community building without having a presence here. There are several people that come to mind that could legitimately post that they are “the fediverse Squid Legend” but all of these have a major footprint on Lemmy.
There is also a sketchy tracker link attached to the images, but I don’t think any of us are really able to say what exactly is happening with this. Like I finally got one of the messages a few days ago and my whitelist firewall logged the sketchy link. Someone else scanned that link in a security context which flagged it as suspicious. As far as I know, that is all that is known about what is underpinning the messages from the network side. Admins likely know more.
All the images look like screenshots taken during video calls. Also some people did some research and found the potential identity of the spammer (based on one of the accounts used) and maybe even the woman herself (coworker of the guy).
Nicole is the Boston Marathon bomber confirmed.
Yeahhhh and see that’s when we need to stop and chill. Give this woman her privacy for the love of God
It’s what confirmed she’s likely the target of harassment and not a spammer herself.
Right I understand that, but I’m saying we need to NOT be doxing either of these people. We really don’t need to stress this poor innocent woman out by getting involved
Holy shit fediverse lore fuckin’ slaps!
Someone floated the idea, others liked the idea, started sharing the idea and once it made full circle, everyone was sure it’s harassment.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills that everyone is saying it’s obviously harassment. Doesn’t make much sense to me. I think it’s obvious she’s a victim but this would be way too niche of a form of harassment for it to be obvious
That said, the course of action should be the same regardless
I gotta give it to you guys. The foresight to prevent a disaster is 10/10. Top tier. Well done.
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.
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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
Foresight? This has been going on for several months.
I took the comment as sarcasm. lol
You forgot this
/sto be honest, this should have been done way earlier.
Still glad you’re doing it now!
You know it had not even crossed my mind until this post but on hindsight it makes perfect sense.
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.
i received another message yesterday, after my instance’s admin claimed they fixed the issue (i assume my blocking the spammer’s ip address from making new accounts)
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.
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.
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.
Ouch
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.
It’s been at least half a year
What kind of a loser does this to someone?
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.
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.
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.
Check out ep 140 of Darknet Diaries. There are some weird sickos out there with a lot of time on their hands.
I can’t believe I managed to never get one of these spam messages. I didn’t even know what a Nicole was until the week or two ago.
I hadn’t either. I received one a few weeks ago, after seeing this thread. Still no idea wtf is going on with it. I just deleted it.
I blocked them so many times. There’s just always more.
Don’t say it out loud! I said the same thing a couple weeks ago, and it’s a weekly thing now.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beet…
Wait, what movie am I watching again?
Yes. I too feel left out.
I heard people talking about it, but just got the message last week. It felt strangely like an initiation. There’s even a link to a discord. I’m terribly curious what goes on there, but don’t want to risk whatever possible ramifications of joining a prolific spammer’s Discord server.
… initiation? Reminds me of that cult who does this to lure people in.
I think some people are taking a joke too seriously.
Wait, a cult sends spam to lure people in?
Yup. They use it for blackmail. It’s weird. Kids are also easily manipulated.
It felt strangely like an initiation.
don’t mystify
Don’t tell other people how to think.
Streisand effect dude. 🤦♂️
