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.

  • Mpatch@lemmy.world
    3213·
    3 days ago

    I gotta give it to you guys. The foresight to prevent a disaster is 10/10. Top tier. Well done.

      • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
        144·
        3 days ago

        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?

        • MrKaplan@lemmy.worldEnglish
          22·
          3 days ago

          That appears to be a baseless conspiracy theory.

          Except for the gore pms, I believe all the images have been uploaded to Lemmy instances or Imgur, which means that the uploader has no way to track IPs accessing those images. The gore images were uploaded to another service that at least on the surface appears to be another regular image hoster that wouldn’t expose IP access logs to uploaders.

          • Aphelion@lemm.ee
            7·
            3 days ago

            I don’t think its baseless given that anyone can set up their own Lemmy instance to host the PM’d images.

            • MrKaplan@lemmy.worldEnglish
              6·
              3 days ago

              The instance domains I’ve seen involved so far at least weren’t set up specifically for this purpose at least. Most of the URLs were pointing to established services and not different per recipient.

              While I can’t rule out that individual users may have received a different URL in an attempt to extract their IP and information about their browser, this at least does not appear to have been done in a larger scale.

              • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                5·
                2 days ago

                A day or two ago, someone spammed out a picture of a murdered body with the standard Fediverse Chick copypasta. That seemed to freak people out; the nicoled community locked down, this thread happened, etc.

                The gore photo seems to be a second actor/copycat. The Nicole spammer either came from their own instances or opened accounts very shortly before spamming, the gore photo, and a following anime style picture done in red-on-white saying “Do you like insanity?” seem to come from accounts that were made 2 years ago.

        • Ricky Rigatoni@lemm.ee
          21·
          2 days ago

          I find it difficult to believe there are enough fediverse users not using a VPN at all times to make that effort worthwhile.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
      524·
      3 days ago

      It’s pretty obvious …

      What’s scary is how many people just accepted that some woman wanted to randomly spam thousands of pictures with her smoking weed.