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.
This is some small internet bullshit i’m here for
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
This annoys the fuck out of me and I hope whoever is behind it doesn’t realize their goals, because I don’t want lemmy to degrade into a bunch of spam PMs.
TBF, it’s bound to happen.
Guaranteed almost.
Lemmy has minimal controls for protecting against spam and bot spam. It’s built to handle the internet 5 to 10 years ago, not the internet today.
I can only hope that this changes because as soon as the platform becomes popular enough (which it is slowly). Then the rate of bot spam and other sorts of spam will just go through the roof, and there’s very little that admins can do to combat it without it becoming a full-time job.
We can have an opt in spam filter that makes it harder, the instances can defederate spamming instances (user) unless they do something which yes there is a lot admins can do at signup. Or have I misunderstood something?
I don’t either want to see story on TV about Internet hacker group “Lenny” destroying womans life by a persistent harassment campaign.
I finally got one a week ago. Have many of you gotten them?
There’s an entire community of people who get them. I think it’s called “Nicoled” but likely shitting down now. Some people were getting up to tens per day.
Jfc I got my first today and was like “oh wow it’s real.” Can’t believe some people are getting multiple a day. That would be annoying as hell
I got my first one last night. Yay! I’m part of the thing now!
At least 4 or 5.
Oh, I think I got one of those. It’s that girl with the bong, right?
Yes, but there are a few pictures around from all of it
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.
Streisand effect dude. 🤦♂️
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.
Understandable.
Who is Nicole and why should I care?
It’s a lemmy specific spam where someone’s pretending to be a girl from Canada and calling themselves Nicole. Mostly through private messages tho.
Not just Lemmy, they followed me on mastodon.
I saw someone on Reddit say that they’ve seen it on a Discord server as well.
To clarify for others, as I have no interest in doing this myself, but if people feel like sharing, are they allowed to do so provided they censor the pictire/remove it entirely from a screenshot? Not sure why someone would, but I figure it doesn’t hurt to ask.
potentially identifying information, such as addresses, must be removed. images of the person must either be heavily pixelated or entirely cut out.
o7
I question if it is even harassment since there was no contact info beyond the sender in the messages I got with this pic. There was no identifying info, etc. It seemed like someone just sent me a random photo and it was very bizarre.
I think the concern is users feeling compelled to find this women’s name and information and then contacting her thinking they are helping, and then multiply that by the dozens, hundreds, or thousands.
Yeah, it’s likely this. Mix in a couple malicious actors looking to ruin her life on top of the spam, and it’s a PR disaster for Lemmy, just waiting to happen.
A picture of someone’s face is identifying info. That’s why we put faces on IDs and show pictures of missing people - it literally identifies them.
Reverse searching the images could give you all that info.
I did and came up with just this spam
Another indicator that the pics are from a compromised webcam.
So you have all the limitless time and energy to address this stupid spam post but you can’t prevent the rise of authoritarian bots and powermods on lemmy.world?
I guess limitless time and energy would be needed to identify authoritarian bots because it’s much harder compared to identifying a person in an image. Should nothing be done because the larger problem can’t be solved at the current time?
Harder for you people maybe, to me they stick out like a tooth ache
Username checks out.
If I had a nickle for every time someone thought that was a clever reply, I’d be able to afford a house
You might even be able to afford therapy.
First: you people? Who are “we”, are unable to identify such contents / opinions? Second: I’m not talking about people identifying content and filtering it, I am talking about automated systems. Do you think that they are filtering Nicole’s by looking at each and every picture?
‘You’ are everyone in existence not me who apparently have a hard time distinguishing authoritarian jargon.
I’m not sure where opinions come into this, are you a bot?
If I can do it, an automated system can do it. Twitter already had it but they didn’t roll it out because it ‘false flagged’ a bunch of repugnican politicians as fascist back in 2015 GUESS WHAT THEY WERE FUCKING ON THE MONEY!
I get it, you’re a terminally online shitstirrer that isn’t getting enough attention. Well I can guarantee this is the last post you’ll be getting any of that from me.
You are absolutely incapable of judging the complexity of the tasks at hand. a) Calculating a hash of every uploaded image, comparing it against a blocklist, and extending the blocklist as needed b) validating each each post to distinguish truth from lie, facts from imagination and on top of that judging whether the presentation opinion fits in a moral/ethical framework of which a computer has no concept of.
A computer is a machine that calculates stuff. It “emulates a brain” to appear smart. A brain is a biological machine that is good in pattern detection and expression, which emulates a computer to do math to appear smart.
If you think an automated system can do it because you can do it, please spend your apparent infinit resources and time in implementing it rather than wasting your valuable time online insulting others who actually do something.
you’re a terminally online shitstirrer that isn’t getting enough attention
I’m seriously impressed you are accusing the other person of doing this. Reread your comments and take a hard look at the vibe you are giving off.
What is an authoritarian bot?
I call dibs on her
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.
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.
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
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 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’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’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.
