PSA: there's a new spam campaign hitting fedi, this one claims to be raising money for insulin and usually has a banner saying "black lives matter" or another progressive slogan.

You can recognize it in the usual ways:
1. Brand-new accounts doing nothing but ask for money.
2. Cold-messaging strangers with personal requests for a boost or donation.
3. Identical or near-identical accounts appearing all over fedi, primarily on open-registration instances.

If you see these accounts or get pinged by them, don't panic! Just report the profile and let your moderators handle it. The image below is an example of what to look out for.

Update: the spammers have adjusted their format a bit, see these posts for details:
-
https://en.osm.town/@thibaultmol/114744923583539270
-
https://en.osm.town/@thibaultmol/114745221813651432

Update 2: This particular round of spam also has a new trick, which is immediately blocking remote instance staff after they create an account. Fortunately, this does not prevent them from being reported! Just continue to report as usual, and moderators can view the content through their report UI (on Mastodon / Akkoma) or by switching accounts (on Misskey / Sharkey).

#PSA #Spam #Scam #FediSpam #MastoSpam #FediAdmins #MastoAdmins

@hazelnoot I've had a whole bunch of these over the past couple weeks.

I've just been muting them all.

@TheSunnyOne that works, but please consider reporting them so the accounts can be suspended!
@hazelnoot new nicole? I didn't even know.
@hazelnoot
some of these have intense "how do you do, fellow queers" energy
@hazelnoot for me the most sus part is the : as spacing and the fact that it links to a donate button url instead of a paypal.me url or ko-fi or liberapay like most people do

EDIT: there is also venmo and cashapp but that is more US-centric
@hazelnoot the biggest issue is due to the fact that its a donate button it is a "Services" transaction which is why it shows this on the page

EDIT: also another thing you can do is just make a business account with another account as the actor and then name the business
first last
@marie it also uses the same general structure as a previous "type 1 diabetes" scam. It's so similar that the previous ModShark rules are still working for this!
@hazelnoot I love abusing human empathy and making people less empathetic /s
@hazelnoot i don’t believe there’s a hell, but sometimes these donation scams make me hopeful
@hazelnoot (Sparkles) and how do I handle it as the moderator (never properly moderated fedi before except for my little experience on shonk.social)
@Sparky the easiest thing to do is to manually approve registrations, if you can. Don't keep them open, since it can allow spam accounts to be created.
Other than that, just keep an eye on suspicious behaviors, especially from new users.
@hazelnoot
@hazelnoot CC @fen idk if we've had this as I haven't seen it but I thought it would be good to let you know about.
@hazelnoot @syphist yeah, we've had a couple. not much I can do about it proactively, unfortunately.
@hazelnoot also update update
Seems like they're using different branding now as well
https://mastodon-japan.net/@Najmaaa
@thibaultmol that particular account is also preemptively blocking instance admins to try and remain hidden!
@hazelnoot ooh wow, that's shady ok, hadn't thought of that
@thibaultmol @hazelnoot Got one of these, the account was deleted before I could do anything but view the post

@hazelnoot them blocking instance staff is funny because if they're dumb about this then I'm automatically immune to their spam by the virtue of having a single-user instance

but also they're likely smart about it because I got hit by this scam once or twice

@hazelnoot, yeah, saw this one earlier they mentioned me directly in their post. If I don't know or follow someone when they do this, I block them.

LB: please, note that it is doubly important to report those accounts since they started blocking moderation teams.

don't just ignore it and move on. report it and forward the report to all instances involved.

@hazelnoot got two of these in the last weeks too
@hazelnoot I've been messaged by those for a week now and I'm annoyed because it seems like it should be easy to auto-suspend a fresh account that sends 100 copies of the same message in less than a minute, but of course this spam is always from the huge instances that insist on never having enough moderation like mastodon.social or mstdn.social
@hazelnoot I've gotten a few DMs from them. I generally block anyone who just cold calls me without interacting first anyhow. Good to know my instincts were right.
@hazelnoot I recognize that avvie--I was @'d by this account, or another account using the same pic!

Also, I told the owner of hear-me.social to suspend all the accounts for his end and from what I got is that they are getting banned from their instance.

Kira,
A member of wafrn.app and hear-me.social