Hello world,
as many of you may already be aware, there is an ongoing spam attack by a person claiming to be Nicole.
It is very likely that these images are part of a larger scale harassment campaign against the person depicted in the images shared as part of this spam.
Although the spammer claims to be the person in the picture, we strongly believe that this is not the case and that they’re only trying to frame them.
Starting immediately, we will remove any images depicting “Nicole” and information that may lead to identifying the real person depicted in those images to prevent any possible harassment.
This includes older posts and comments once identified.
We also expect moderators to take action if such content is reported.
While we do not intend to punish people posting this once, not being aware of the context, we may take additional actions if they continue to post this content, as we consider this to be supporting the harassment campaign.
Discussion that does not include the images themselves or references that may lead to identifying the real person behind the image will continue to be allowed.
If you receive spam PMs please continue reporting them and we’ll continue working on our spam detections to attempt to identify them early before they reach many users.
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I gotta give it to you guys. The foresight to prevent a disaster is 10/10. Top tier. Well done.
to be honest, this should have been done way earlier.
Still glad you’re doing it now!
You know it had not even crossed my mind until this post but on hindsight it makes perfect sense.
Foresight? This has been going on for several months.
I took the comment as sarcasm. lol
You forgot this
/s
Yeah it seemed funny at first but the longer this went on the creepier it got as we all realized this isn’t just a catfish.
Whoever is doing this to the actual person in the photos is a terrible human being and should go climb under a rock for the rest of their lives.
Agreed. When the images started to change it got really creepy.
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I’ve seen several different images and there was a video on peertube. All of them look like content from a hacked webcam.
Yeah, that’s what I thought from the very first DM I received. It looks like Shea totally unaware a picture was taken of her. Surely, if this were real, “Nicole” would use a more flattering picture to potential friends.
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It got super creepy when more shots of this women were released of her doing activities that no one would ever take a photo of themselves doing. Then the last photo was released separately of a NSFW don’t read if you are not in a place to read gore/graphic/assault
Tap for spoiler
Real photo of a dead woman who looks like Nicole in a morgue body bag with her flesh peeled off and her face beaten. It’s unlikely that this disturbing turn is real but it was horrific for people who received this last spam. That is what triggered the ultimate ban on all images (since this is most likely a psychopathic copycat). :(
I can’t wait for the future 4 hour video deep dive into Nicole history and lore.
Question is, is it going to be made by Whang or Nexpo?
Count Dankula’s madlasses
Neither. Hopefully someone like wendigoon or oki’s weird stories. Someone a bit more investigative and less semsationalistic than nexpo.
I’m hoping it’s not made by Caitlin Doughty.
Is this Nicole thing really still a thing? That’s so like back when I still had a 401k.
So was it last week or the day before yesterday? It all happens so fast, I can’t - and frankly - refuse to catch up.
It’s been ongoing for a few weeks at least. Maybe months.
It’s been at least half a year
My government salutes you!
Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos.
i received another message yesterday, after my instance’s admin claimed they fixed the issue (i assume my blocking the spammer’s ip address from making new accounts)
the problem with this spam and generally federated platforms is that you can only really try detecting it based on the content. the accounts tend to get created on another instance and then the messages federate over to you, which means you won’t see a lot of the identifying information you’d see for a local user, such as their IP address.
I just chalked it up to “a necessary evil” in order to take advantage of federated platforms. I found it funny at first, and then just ignored it. I never thought that it could’ve been some smear campaign, but rather scammers looking for easy targets.
I’m glad mods are doing something about it, even if it’s not a perfect fix.
IP bans aren’t great either. A decent spammer will just use a vpn. Then you’re just banning IPs from a service that other users might also use. An even more sophisticated bad actor would just use a bot net.
Ouch
Wait, there are people who genuinely believe she’s the one behind it?
I thought it was pretty obvious that she’s the target of harassment. Some people must be new to the Internet
Yeah, I’ve been targeted by enough romance spam that I just assume any photo of a woman I don’t know was probably stolen from some random Tumblr or Instagram.
Everyone is 1 of the 10000. Even the people who have to look up what being 1 of the 10000 means
I had to look it up, and after reading a lengthily Wikipedia page on Greek mercenaries, I tried the second result: an XKCD comic I’ve seen before but had forgotten. So today, I’m one of the lucky 10,000 again.
I’ve seen internet harassment campaigns, none have looked like this. She doesn’t feel like the target here. If you wanted to use the internet to harass a girl, is this how you would implement it?
Yeah. This is older than the internet. It’s like writing “For a good time call Nicole” and writing someone you don’t like’s number in a truck stop bathroom.
…actually…
Thank you for your work managing the spam waves!
Considering the spammer has used so many different photos, and they all seem to be “in the moment” webcam photos, I suspect they may have webcam spyware on the victim’s computer
She looks to me like a college student attending an online class. Looks like it’s shot on a laptop’s built-in camera, lighting is whatever, she’s dressed casually and comfortably, facial expression is neutral or even bored…
If you’re taking a college class via Zoom, can you see your classmates’ webcams?
Ripping a bong on zoom in class?
It’s not the 90s anymore Becky. Live a little!
You don’t frame yourself perfectly in your webcam’s view before you take bong rips?
I feel like we can rule out spyware and online class. More likely a group call with friends or something like that
Yeah, why not?
Yes, almost always, if the professor requires you to have webcam on. AFAIK the whole meeting sees everyone who has webcam on.
Yes. Sometimes it is required to have your camera on. Even when it isn’t required, there are always some people who prefer to have theirs on for whatever reason.
with the content i’ve seen it gave me more of an impression of being captures of a live stream, but that’s just guessing
True, that’s probably more likely
Didn’t somebody locate livestreams by the person in the pictures? I want to say I read that in one of the research threads.
Could be completely AI generated with variations of the same person. But that doesn’t really matter, the spam needs to go.
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Considering it says she’s in school, it seems more likely that it might be an online class where the students are sharing their webcam
Is this the person some folks around here were referring to as the “Fediverse chick?”
Yes, as that is how “she” initially introduced herself
Was that a real introduction or simply another person using a stolen identify?
It’s almost certainly someone using pictures they took from a live stream
That is the point of this post. It was always considered to be spam and folks were trying to figure out what the motivation was and now they are working on the theory they are trying to be a dick to someone.
Someome’s trying to be Chris Hansen or something.
Yep. That’s the one
What of the recent NSFW/gore images that were shared? Has that been reported to authorities?
Not expecting police to solve it, but at least it would be on their radar.
we looked into it, we currently believe that to be a copycat not related to the other pms.
the lemmy.world account involved in that was most certainly compromised from an unrelated data breach and all connections originated from IPs linked to an anonymization service, so there’s also not much to follow up on.
we will reconsider this if it happens again.
This annoys the fuck out of me and I hope whoever is behind it doesn’t realize their goals, because I don’t want lemmy to degrade into a bunch of spam PMs.
I finally got one a week ago. Have many of you gotten them?
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Jfc I got my first today and was like “oh wow it’s real.” Can’t believe some people are getting multiple a day. That would be annoying as hell
I got my first one last night. Yay! I’m part of the thing now!
At least 4 or 5.
I don’t either want to see story on TV about Internet hacker group “Lenny” destroying womans life by a persistent harassment campaign.
part of a larger scale harassment campaign against the person depicted
Oh boy that’s horrible, if true I hope she has reported it to police, and they can help her.
Damn, I never thought about it this way. Wow. I always took it as a funny thing not thinking of the person in the photo being an actual person who could very well be harassed. Thank you for bringing this to light. Whoever thought of this is a good human being. <3
I told the person sending the image to kys :/
Yay, fediverse lore!
Would rather more positive lore, but I guess it is fediverse lore. Just checked from curiosity, all but 2 messages I have got are from Nicole bots, 1 was another spammer and the other an automated “welcome to this community” bot message.
Yeah. At least Colby and the Jolly Ranchers didn’t involve harassment of an innocent person.
Colby involved worse things than harassment.
Colby was a made-up story. The victim of this incident is a real, human person.
The word ‘nodule’ still makes me gag
Remember that guy who wanted to know how not to poop for three days!?
https://web.archive.org/web/20230624223444/https://lemmy.world/post/440073
For posterity. I’m gonna make a post for this one for others to find. It’s too glorious.
I miss the wizard trend though.
Edit: https://mander.xyz/post/27989180?scrollToComments=true
Beans
And jeans
What a ride! So proud for him
Do the Owl Of The Year tournies break into c/all?
I thought she loved me.
She loves us
🛠️ (my instance doesn’t have a hammer and sickle so this will do)
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣤⣀⣀⣀⠀⠻⣷⣄ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣴⣿⣿⣿⡿⠋⠀⠀⠀⠹⣿⣦⡀ ⠀⠀⢀⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣏⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢹⣿⣧ ⠀⠀⠙⢿⣿⡿⠋⠻⣿⣿⣦⡀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⣿⡆ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠉⠀⠀⠀⠈⠻⣿⣿⣦⡀⠀⢸⣿⣿⡇ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣀⣄⡀⠀⠀⠈⠻⣿⣿⣶⣿⣿⣿⠁ ⠀⠀⠀⣠⣿⣿⢿⣿⣶⣶⣶⣶⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⡁ ⢠⣶⣿⣿⠋⠀⠀⠉⠛⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠛⠻⣿⣿⣦⡀ ⣿⣿⠟⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠻⣿⡿
You’re welcome
what?
Appears correctly on Voyager, original commenter should’ve used a code block.
Edit: I suppose display size does matter - iPhone 16 Pro
doesn’t work 100% on my Voyager
Google Pixel 8 btw
ah thank you.
just as in real life, communism doesn’t work here either lol
Thank you, comrade
If we remain faithful to nicole we will be delivered eternal life. Lisan al nicole.
Sorry if this isn’t the right place to ask, but are you able to confirm whether admins have reported this to the police?
Even if violence hasn’t been perpetrated, the harassment is still a crime surely.
I don’t know if others have, I only know that we (Lemmy.World, Fedihosting Foundation) have not reported it to the police.
I don’t have high hopes that the police would be able to do anything about this. For the harassment against the person shown in the images, that would likely have to be reported by them directly for the police to take that up.
For random online spam, as in harassment of fediverse users receiving the PMs, that seems like it would be an extremely low priority for police. It’s also likely fairly difficult to impossible to follow up on, considering that the person sending the PMs most likely used a VPN to access these accounts.Hmm.
The people receiving the spam are not being harassed, obviously.
The woman depicted is very likely the target of harassment.
Sharing the images depicting violence is tantamount to a threat of violence.
As admins, you’re not just witnesses but the stewards of a community and the representatives of many thousands of people in this matter.
Pre-empting what the police will do is not a reason not to report. You don’t know what they will do. They might do nothing at you would have wasted 15 minutes. On the other hand perhaps Nicole has been trying to get a restraining order against some creep but has been unable to due to lack of evidence.
The woman depicted is very likely the target of harassment.
Agreed, but there is no proof of this. We also don’t know their true identity to check with them directly.
Sharing the images depicting violence is tantamount to a threat of violence.
The images did not depict violence directly, it was a gory image of a dead person. They were very likely sent by a copycat not involved in the original harassment campaign and intended to fuck up fediverse users more than anything else. They did not appear to imply any kind of threat.
you would have wasted 15 minutes
This would require a lot more than 15 minutes to file a proper report. First we have to collect all relevant information that we have available and compile them in a format that can be submitted. Once we have this information we have to identify a police department to report this to. We are legally based in NL, as that’s where our non-profit Fedihosting Foundation is located. I’m based in Germany, so it would also be an option to report it here. The depicted person is claimed to be in Canada, so maybe this should be reported to a police department over there. Or maybe to all of them.
All of this would easily add up to 2 hours or more if you want to do it properly and not just look for 3 online forms to write “hey there is someone sending spam”.
If this was a paid job and I was doing this during working hours I wouldn’t mind, but all the time I spend here is taken out of my personal time, the same as with anyone else on our team, and also the same you’ll see with most other fediverse instances.perhaps Nicole has been trying to get a restraining order against some creep but has been unable to due to lack of evidence.
If we receive a request for information from (real) law enforcement we’ll be more than happy to provide relevant data, but doing this for the (perceived low) chance of that somehow being linked from a random police report is a fairly high time investment as described above.
This would require a lot more than 15 minutes to file a proper report…. All of this would easily add up to 2 hours or more…
Tell you what: log the time it takes, and I will personally pay you $60/hour for your time to make a proper report.
And no, I’m not being sarcastic.
I truly appreciate the offer, but my concern isn’t about money, it’s about this taking away even more of my personal time. If this was a regular day job I was doing, rather than my actual day job, which I have in addition to the time I spend on Lemmy.World related activities, then I could file this during my regular working hours. After all, it’s time I’d spend being at work anyway.
I’ve recently been spending countless hours already dealing with other stuff that is not directly tied to Lemmy.World but came up “around” it, including sending abuse reports to various instances about CSAM that federated to them a long time ago. This includes time spent on identifying such material, then finding suitable abuse report mechanisms, providing instructions for how to deal with it. Afterwards it needs reviewing whether the content has been removed or requires further escalation steps, such as one case where I’ve filed a police report today for a case where neither the instance itself nor the hosting provider deals with abuse reports at all.
As mentioned before, there also seem to have been two different people involved in sending these messages, the original person, where most of the information is/was available publicly and has been collected by various people already, who would be in a much better position to report this content to law enforcement.
The person sending the gore images did in fact use a Lemmy.World account in one case, which we do have more information about than publicly available or available for users on other instances, so this would be the only case for which we’d be in a privileged position for reporting. This however would also most certainly not be a report that would help any sort of harassment investigation, as this copycat probably doesn’t have any ties to the original harasser.If we had a significantly larger amount of donations towards our foundation we’d also be able to pay someone to deal with things like this, but we’re currently just over the hosting costs with our monthly donations.
Respectfully, I don’t share your assessment of the seriousness of the crime. You seem to be weighing the question of whether someone has been harassed or intimidated from the perspective of a “reasonable third party”. However, I suspect that the law assigns considerable weight to the question of whether the victim feels intimidated or harassed. For example, you’re correct that sharing the gore image is not a direct threat of violence, however I feel certain that the woman depicted in the earlier images taken from the live stream would feel concerned for their safety.
I would also like to clarify one aspect of which you may not be aware. It’s very easy to confirm the woman’s place of work beyond any reasonable doubt, with images she has posted to other platforms.
I understand that it’s unreasonable to say that you specifically or any admins of lemmy.world or any other instance should give up hours of your free time to make a police report.
However, as others in this thread have suggested this incident underlines the limited protections lemmy has against this type of attack and it seems likely that we will see a lot more.
I also respectfully disagree regarding the likelihood that reporting this crime could be useful. It’s not a question of “somehow being linked from a random police report”. If the victim ever does contact the police, which seems very likely to me, it’s extraordinarily likely that a report from lemmy would be identified as being related.
It’s not my intention to berate you personally over this, and as I mentioned above I acknowledge that it’s unreasonable to expect you personally to take action in this specific case. I am however concerned that Lemmy’s federated nature is not well suited to addressing this type of risk to members of our community.
I have spam in my email. Should I report that to the police as well?
There just isn’t enough for regular police to go on, without even considering jurisdiction. Cooperating with authorities is fine, but there’s not really anyone to proactively reach out to about this.
Yes. If you run an email server and one of the accounts has been used to perpetrate a harassment campaign including threats of violence then obviously you should report that.
Agreed. At least here in the US, you’d have more chance of winning the lottery than getting a cop to care about this issue without the person directly involved reporting it. And even then it would be a crapshoot.
The right cop will care about it, but the right cop doesn’t work for your city and so you don’t have any way to contact them.
Anyone asking you to file a report with police has likely never had to file a police report. They don’t even want to file reports for things that actually happened directly to you, if they can convince you out of it lol.
I’m not a fan of LEO, BUT at the same time doing nothing should not be an option. What I mean by that is that Johnny Law should still be contacted and a report filed (at the very least). Even if they do not follow up on it, that’s on them and not us (the fediverse).
Would it even be realistic to know the right place to report it to? Just because the messages say Toronto doesn’t necessarily mean the victim is in Toronto, and reporting it to the wrong place at most probably just means wasting resources in one location and coming no closer to stopping the harassment. Is there anything from a national group like the RCMP, FBI, or INTERPOL to help in a case like this?
There’s a video of her eating food in the shopping centre where whe works. You can find it on google Street view.
Haha what fantasy land do you live in where that helps anything?
Actually smartass, it’s called Australia. We have laws specifically to address this exact situation. I have made police reports in my time, and can assure you that the police would take a campaign of this scale very seriously.
