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.
I saw a theory a while back that the IPs which receive the various images get logged allowing the recipients accounts to be tied to an IP and possibly even a physical address based on the timeframe it was sent. Is that a real concern or just conspiracy, do you think?
I find it difficult to believe there are enough fediverse users not using a VPN at all times to make that effort worthwhile.
most people don’t. the only device I have that runs a VPN 24/7 is a laptop that seeds
I use a VPN on everything else if I’m doing something sketchy thougheveryone should be more like me :3
Still glad you’re doing it now!
Thanks. Even if it isn’t a harassment campaign I’m sick of the messaging
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.
About damn time. The joke has run it’s course a long time a ago and if these posts are victimizing an individual they most definitely need to be stopped.
I can’t wait for the future 4 hour video deep dive into Nicole history and lore.
I’ve been thinking this since it started and saying it for a bit. I don’t understand at all how there were memes of this on the front page all the time and it took this long to do even this. Has there been any attempt at an effort to notify whoever is in the picture that this is happening? I would like to help if possible.
I think “notify her” feeds the harassment they’re referring to, even if contacting her is well intended
Is this Nicole thing really still a thing? That’s so like back when I still had a 401k.
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.
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.
I can’t believe I managed to never get one of these spam messages. I didn’t even know what a Nicole was until the week or two ago.
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
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?
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.
No need, this info isn’t hard to compile, only took a few hours. If anyone does intend to take this to law enforcement, please PM me as I have compiled what I think to be almost all of the public information available about this case.
you could easily report this to the police yourself then. i don’t really have anything more than what is publicly available, with the exception being one of the gore spam accounts.
I’m not saying you have to, but given that various people already collected a lot of information related to that stuff, they would be much better suited in actually reporting this to police somewhere.
Haha what fantasy land do you live in where that helps anything?
I’ve heard that if you actually add her on friendica, the mayor of Toronto shows up at your house and gives you an old fashioned.
deleted by creator
I thought she loved me.
She loves us
🛠️ (my instance doesn’t have a hammer and sickle so this will do)
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣤⣀⣀⣀⠀⠻⣷⣄ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣴⣿⣿⣿⡿⠋⠀⠀⠀⠹⣿⣦⡀ ⠀⠀⢀⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣏⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢹⣿⣧ ⠀⠀⠙⢿⣿⡿⠋⠻⣿⣿⣦⡀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⣿⡆ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠉⠀⠀⠀⠈⠻⣿⣿⣦⡀⠀⢸⣿⣿⡇ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣀⣄⡀⠀⠀⠈⠻⣿⣿⣶⣿⣿⣿⠁ ⠀⠀⠀⣠⣿⣿⢿⣿⣶⣶⣶⣶⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⡁ ⢠⣶⣿⣿⠋⠀⠀⠉⠛⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠛⠻⣿⣿⣦⡀ ⣿⣿⠟⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠻⣿⡿
You’re welcome
If I resize my view it works but otherwise… xd
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
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.
