Mastodawn

Allie Healer Mar 1

Dwight Silverman

Head's up, Mastodon users: There appears to be a coordinated effort to impersonate relatively high-profile people who have accounts on various instances but who have not used them in a while.

I've gotten several follow notifications - and a couple of DMs - from impersonators of people I know. The bogus accounts have lots of underscores in the handles, and they repost items from the past, sometimes years old. If you spot this, please report, do not engage, and then block.

Pls boost.

Paul Sutton (zleap)Mar 1

Thanks for the heads up :)

Thor - The Moderator Mar 1

@dsilverman thanks for letting everyone know. I shared it with the IndieWeb.social community just now.

Flash Mob Of One Mar 1

@dsilverman I only know one celeb who follows plebs: the great Diana Prince.

rk: it’s hyphen-minus actually Mar 1

I’m on clone number four or five of a friend of mine. They create an account, use his bio and profile pic, retoot a couple of my toots that my friend had liked, and then DM me to ask if I’ve heard of Bitcoin

Preston Austin Mar 1

@dsilverman I've seen and reported several of these pod-person clone accounts, for one particular account four of them so far

FWIW, I decided not to block them because (in theory) that could signal to whoever is doing this that their cloned accounts should stop following me to evade getting reported

They seem to be after relatively credentialed credible sorts of people too

Toni Aittoniemi Mar 1

@dsilverman I had this pulled on my by several pro-Russian accounts operating from chinese servers in 2024. It’s nasty!

millennial fulcrum Mar 2

@gimulnautti cripes!

Oberst Enzian Mar 1

@dsilverman This is a deliberate effort to enshittify our platform.

Boris Barbour Mar 1

I tried to reply as if I had been taken in, but what/whoever is running them is not really up to holding a conversation.

A slow burn, I love you.Mar 1

@dsilverman PLEASE KNOW I am not impersonating anyone, I started here for the first time with these underscores. Lol.

millennial fulcrum Mar 2

@Mage_of_Chaos @dsilverman Mage_of_SUSPICION 😂

The Turtle Mar 2

@dsilverman all I got today was somebody looking for money. Nobody who followed me, nobody I followed, nobody I'd ever seen post anywhere, in a private mention.

I thought those were restricted to mutual follows.

Blocked.

@dsilverman
well done. thank you.

millennial fulcrum Mar 2

@dsilverman aww, just like twitter used to fake

@dsilverman I'll report if I find any, to the instance admins they're on

Widdershins Smith 🐘Mar 2

No, no, no, you never boost anything where the OP asks you to boost... It's the first rule of anti-SPAM posting 😂.

Unless you have been the target, personally, of the said problem, boosting just makes you part of the SPAM problem.

John Sexton Mar 2

@dsilverman Thanks for the heads up!

Also, not a bot here but did follow you just now as I followed you forever on the bird-site and miss the link to houston on my timeline

@dsilverman https://mastodon.social/@dsilverman/116154971051282021
Some advise: Don't follow high-profile people. They usually haven't got anything interesting to spout.

Dwight Silverman Mar 3

@Scubyw Depends on who the high-profile is. Some are quite worth the follow.

But in this case, as I indicated originally, these are accounts that have been mostly abandoned. They're definitely not worth a follow.

MėMėNTō MōRi📍🇪🇺🇩🇪Mar 7

@dsilverman 👍🏽