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 gotta give it to you guys. The foresight to prevent a disaster is 10/10. Top tier. Well done.
to be honest, this should have been done way earlier.
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?
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.
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
You know it had not even crossed my mind until this post but on hindsight it makes perfect sense.
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
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Foresight? This has been going on for several months.
I took the comment as sarcasm. lol
You forgot this
/s
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). :(
I can’t wait for the future 4 hour video deep dive into Nicole history and lore.
Question is, is it going to be made by Whang or Nexpo?
Count Dankula’s madlasses
Neither. Hopefully someone like wendigoon or oki’s weird stories. Someone a bit more investigative and less semsationalistic than nexpo.
I’m hoping it’s not made by Caitlin Doughty.
Is this Nicole thing really still a thing? That’s so like back when I still had a 401k.
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
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.
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
I’ve heard that if you actually add her on friendica, the mayor of Toronto shows up at your house and gives you an old fashioned.
I’ll give it a go
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.
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
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
Didn’t somebody locate livestreams by the person in the pictures? I want to say I read that in one of the research threads.
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?
It’s not the 90s anymore Becky. Live a little!
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
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.
Could be completely AI generated with variations of the same person. But that doesn’t really matter, the spam needs to go.
Considering it says she’s in school, it seems more likely that it might be an online class where the students are sharing their webcam
WTF is a Nicole image
Edit: After seeing responses…. I got it weeks ago but just ignored it as spam and didn’t even read it. The pic jogs my memory
Nicole AKA the fediverse girl/chick
How long have you been here? I’ve only been here a few weeks and got no fewer than ten of these messages.
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.
I wonder how Nicole chooses? I just got one image.
It’s likely not Nicole herself. It’s spam trying to frame her.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
Thanks! It was getting bad.
They are not stopping the messages, just removing posts with her picture other people have shared.
Damn, I never thought about it this way. Wow. I always took it as a funny thing not thinking of the person in the photo being an actual person who could very well be harassed. Thank you for bringing this to light. Whoever thought of this is a good human being. <3
I told the person sending the image to kys :/
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.
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.
might make sense to notify the educational institution she was said to be attending.
Thank you for your work managing the spam waves!
I assumed it was something like a pig butchering crypto scam.
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Not sure about that. I see a LOT of lemmy posters who seem to never have had a girlfriend or are too scared to talk to girls in real life. lol
No one is immune. The feeling of invulnerability leads to complacency, complacency leads to sloppiness and sloppiness leads to the
darkeasy mark side.
