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.
Weird, I’d assumed it was just AI generated? What makes people think it’s harassment?
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
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.