Just some thoughts. We know the spammed messages have alluded to real places, and at least one of them has even given a workplace address, inviting the recipient to “come say hi” or similar. I’m aware that some of the places seem to change around, but that workplace thing in particular has galvanized how I think about this whole situation. The same day, I scrolled through some posts that were treating all the “hints” like some kind of ARG, like going to that workplace and asking for a Nicole would yield some special clue that will lead them to the next step of the ARG. (the shitty thing is that there is a vanishingly small non-zero chance of that being true regardless)
The odds that the person in the photos is consenting to being part of a spam effort are pretty low I’d think. The fact that some of them seem to be baiting users to a particular physical location reads like some early 2000s kiwi farm bullshit, and it’s creepy to see unfolding here on the Lemmyverse. The links are just spam, sure, and spam is just part of the sewage wading exercise that is using the internet, that’s not what bothers me. It’s the social side. These are real places, they’re photos are of a real person, which means someone really wants to get this face out there to a bunch of nerds. Given a big enough population, there’s statistically going to be someone receiving this spam who could give that person a hard time with enough nudging.
Personally I don’t think it’s a pig butchering scam. I think someone is trying to rope an unstable stranger into hurting/stalking/physically harassing someone.
I’m conflicted on one thing: I would think that the person in the photos should know that their likeness is being used this way, and to maybe take some precautions if any of the information. At the same time, I’m not exactly jumping with joy at the thought of going on a public forum like this one and saying “Hey guys help me dox this person for their own safety!”. Maybe I haven’t had to think about this much before since I avoid a lot of traditional social media where the spindly pointy tentacles of harassment campaigns do breach out into popular online spaces. This can’t be the first time something like this happens. I just don’t know what the most ethical way to deal with this is.
Not the spam, you can filter spam. I’m talking about dealing with the social consequences of whatever this is.
edit: cleaned up some wording.
Nicole will be a thing of the past soon. The latest lemmy release supports auto deletion of DMs that were sent by banned accounts and some servers are implementing DM scanning for nicole messages. So whatever Nicole is, it wont matter anymore soon.
This is pretty optimistic that spammers can’t figure out ways around spam filters, but I hope you’re right.
spam filters
those are secondary. The more important thing is the DM deletion. It means that as soon as one person gets the attention of an admin about a new spambot, all the spam messages of that wave will be gone. If it had been like that from the start, Nicole would never have become something more than a few dozen people ever see. Ofcourse they could just deploy thousands of bots at once, but i believe we have good safeguards against that already.
Which means that there is the danger that a few bad instances can censor anybody by marking them as spam.
Thats kinda sad to read. Maybe it shouldn’t be. The feddie baddie did no wrong to me
People have submitted ideas for possible threat models that could be carried out with spam waves like these. So while it was a funny meme, its good to put a stop to it.
Yeah I agree. Its fun and would be sad to see it go but ultimately its for the best. Give a scammer an inch and they will take your ssn
One day a true crime youtuber will make a video talking about Nicole while an ominous song plays in the background.
Yeah this is what I was thinking. As Reddit gets shittier the ability to make content off of “internet mysteries” is going to become tougher.
This is currently still a prime candidate for a YouTuber Content Creator to do a 25 minute video. If this ends tragically then it’ll be a 45 minute video.
Hello Whang
Hi Whang I’m so happy to be in your video :3
If we ever get to know what this is about, I’d love to do this…
New content [on your youtube channel] is always good. When FQQLivestream of you investigating further?
Probably not something I’d do. This is likely to be harassment against the person in the picture, and given that there seemingly are addresses and phone numbers of that person floating around, I wouldn’t want to do that publicly. Or privately for that matter. It’s almost just stalking.
alternative possibility, this “Nicole” could be generated via AI, a là https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
there are sophisticated enough models out there that can deep fake a convincing human face and body, along with a photoshopped background, or even completely AI made backgrounds
This looks much more like real, unintentional webcam shots rather than AI, imo
On the other hand you could prompt for that aesthetic to make it even more convincing.
You’re right, it really is a complicated thing, and I’m still unsure on how to deal with this… The main goal right now is to find ways to stop this spam from happening, as well as imforming lemmy users about how the scam might work. I’m not fond of the whole community publicly collaborating to dox the person in the images behind this. (Or even the spammer, on that matter.)
