What happened?
Due to the recent developments, I have decided to make this community moderator-only. There has been a mass spam attack involving gore and nudity. This is now a very serious situation and it is clear that something has to be done to stop this from happening. The new messages might be from a different, psychopathic spammer.
What we decided to do about it
To have better control of this situation, we decided to lock down the community, except for the comment section on this very post. (Please let me know if I’ve missed a post)
Rules
- Please refrain to further spread the newest spam image, especially uncensored versions of it.
- The “It’s my girlfriend!”-joke is long gone. Be respectful, stop using it.
Going forward
Our main goal now is to stop the spread of spam on Lemmy. This seems like a major problem in Lemmy’s concept, so we need to work together to create a working solution to the spam and potential defacing of users.
Update: The source of the gore images has been identified, so it’s safe to say it’s not actually the same person as “Nicole”. Still fucked up, though.
Just wanted to report that the latest Nicole spam I received 10 min ago is asking for crypto “donations”.
So this may be finally the reason for the phishing, getting crypto donations from gullible people.
Looks like this:
By the way, has anyone contacted Imgur about this? I think they would take it pretty seriously.
I got one just now as well. I suspect it might even be a different person using the Nicole spam as a cover?
Edit: does anyone know, are there any plans to allow users to disable DMs? It feels like it should be a basic privacy feature and would have stopped all this. Mastodon has the same issue (apparently there’s an option to stop non followers DMing you, but I can’t find it).
…i received the same message yesterday with a new image, so i suspect it’s the original spammer finally firing his payload…
This was the username (already reported). The Nicole text was part of the image (green text on black) and the message body was the bitcoin IDs. I find targeting the Fediverse for this type of scam to be a bit pointless. I doubt there are many people on here who would fall for this sort of scam. The only advantage I can see to targeting the Fediverse is the inability to restrict private messages.
I got the message a few mins after logging on. Both times on Lemmy, I got the Nicole spam when online (I can’t remember if that was the case on Mastodon). I don’t know if that’s coincidence.
…i’ve received nine nicole messages, each from different usernames, but the payload message was from goldeneyeitemis@lemmy.laitinlok.com…
It’s clearly not the same as the gore spammer if real nicole spam is still happening