UPDATE: I got two more messages of the same type from Nicole, in like the past ten minutes.
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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Nicoled
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47 users here now
Hi, I'm Nicole! But you can call me the Fediverse Chick :D
For when you or others get nicoled.
founded 2 weeks ago
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What exactly does she expect to gain actually? I see those "scammer" titles but don't understand the scam...
No one truly knows. It could be a test for future scams, a harassment campaign against the person in the images, etc.
A romance scam is typically when they befriend you through chat. Then when they think you are invested in the relationship, they will send a message that they are in distress and can you send some money to help them out. Or sometimes is a send money for flights to come a see you. Obviously they don't go anywhere beyond that and will just have more reasons to send money. The pictures of the fake person are often lifted from real people's social media. In this case it appears to be a webcam chat with someone.
Oh, I see. Are you invested enough to give me a dollar? Or should we talk more?
Ooo, I'd love a dollar. Thank you!
I have been talking to her for 8 days now, and I don't think my girlfriend should be qualified as a romance scam. I just helped her pay for her studies a bit, but that's called "caring". You should try it sometimes.
Did anyone get to talk to the person running the Nicole accounts?
@[email protected] I think you'd like to stay updated on the latest techniques from our friendly neighborhood scammer
Trying to play smart, lol. I've added a slur filter regex, that should delete all her messages. You still get it sent (limitation from lemmy :c) but it just appears as removed
uhhmm... yeah, about that:
Fuck. I guess it's local only to our instance.
Oh well, feel free to convince your instance admin https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/40120033
It looks like they're using non-ASCII unicode characters. Does the linked method still work?
I just tested the slur regex method (only thing we use) and yep, still works.
it's still sent though, but at least if they ever include a harmful link nobody gets to see it. So at most, it's just a minor annoyance.
removed
Up here, i just pasted her entire message; but it appears as "removed". It works :)
...why are you getting downvoted?
Wait, what? odd, i didn't even notice. It doesn't federate for me.
I don't have a clue, maybe nicole got angry that i blocked her ;) (only for our community, though)
Edit: I think this community doesn't federate properly with dbzer0 for some reason, even though i have been subscribed since its creation. My post only has 5 upvotes from here, while on LW it has like 28?
!!!
Guess that's a reminder not to give much weight to those numbers
So, explain this move to me:
We know it's a scam of some kind, to the point a community has sprung up to discuss it. Why keep pushing the exact same scam? Is it working somehow?
Lately, I'm starting to believe that rather than any scam, this may be a harassment campaign. The target seems to be the person in the images.
That would be horrible and makes this more creepy than anything. I almost hope it’s a scam instead of targeted harassment. But now that you’ve said this I feel very uneasy that you may be right
Someone here recently did some digging and found some LinkedIn and Facebook accounts that seemed to be from a girl eerily similar to the one in the photos. Also, the Matrix server once leaked an address that seemed to be near the University in the messages.
This is almost certainly a harassment campaign.
Innovative way to go about that, I guess.