Mastodon.social StaffPlease report any account that claims that you need to verify your #Mastodon account to continue using it. It is a scam. Don't click the links. Real staff accounts either have a special role badge on their profile or are verified through the joinmastodon.org domain.
We're as frustrated as everyone else with these phishing attacks. mastodon.social had new sign-ups in approval mode this week to limit the impact, but offenders targeted other instances and compromised existing accounts. We take the problem very seriously; we're suspending and blocking as quickly as possible, as well as actively working on countermeasures.
Matt Noyes@staff Hi friends, if you had all new sign-ups in approval mode, and kept them that way, this problem could be alleviated going forward.
@Matt_Noyes This is unfortunately not true. In most cases, closing our signups has merely moved attacks to other servers. In this case, it's mostly moved it to compromised accounts. And even in approval mode, spammers get through!
Combating spam is a constantly moving target, each change you make causes the approach to shift. We have some new tools in the latest builds, and hopefully we'll have even more options in the future with FASPs.