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.
Same thing happened to me. It was somebody who the last time I interacted with him we were on opposite sides of a proposed privacy law, so I suggested it would make a great comedy/action movie: "Years after their battle over teh Bad Washington Privacy Act, Jon and Jules have to team up to fight an impersonation ring on Mastodon"
More positively it led to him posting again here from his real account for the first time in a couple of years. So hey, maybe this will lead to an increase Monthly Active Users numbers?
Agreed. Although with people I'm mutuals with here, I think of it more as I don't know them IRL yet.
Thanks for the heads up :)
Iβm 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 Iβve heard of Bitcoin
@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
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.
@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.
No, no, no, you never boost anything where the OP asks you to boost... It's the first rule of anti-SPAM posting π.
Unless you have been the target, personally, of the said problem, boosting just makes you part of the SPAM problem.
@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
@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.
Rudi
Dwight Silverman
Annelies Kamran, Ph.D.
Jon
Paul Sutton (zleap)
Thor - The Moderator
Flash Mob Of One
rk: itβs hyphen-minus actually
Preston Austin
CaliCarol
Toni Aittoniemi
millennial fulcrum
Oberst Enzian
Boris Barbour
I love you, I am proud of you!
The Turtle
DonCC
patricus
Widdershins Smith π
John Sexton
Scubyw
MΔMΔNTΕ MΕRiππͺπΊπ©πͺ