No, this network is hybrid: they have actual people doing the account creation for the most part, the software just autogenerates the names and prompts the bio
Look, if I'm going to be in the hellscape of getting followed by some combination of pornbots and exploited workers attempting pig butchering scams, could they at least pretend to be of the correct gender presentation?
You must be special. Are you in their board or something? Do they have someone in their moderation team assigned to your lists? I have tens of thousands of obvious scammers in my lists that keep on spamming and scamming and nobody does a thing about them.
No, I just report things like everyone else does! Make sure you fill out the comments field with why you're reporting the account, and use the word "bot" or "scammer" when it applies; they do some filtering of reports to expedite them appropriately.
Hm! Augmentation, then? Her narrow chin does not seem to mesh with the vast tracts. (Perhaps I have not seen enough people with vast tracts; the ones I've seen tend to be less pointy *everywhere*.)
Is there a bunch of bots/scammers pretending to be Palestinian mothers and refugees asking for money? I saw a couple following me and I found it very suspicious. Any advice on how to check it?
Mmm. I do not comment on the authenticity of individual Palestinian accounts because it makes some people very angry when I do. Some of them are real, and very desperate! It's a lot lower than the number people think are real.
I feel a bit guilty every time I block an alleged Palestinian account. I just can't tell who is real; digging down would be a full-time job. Occasional spot checks finds that the vast majority reuse imagery, ergo are likely scammers. None of them ever talk to me, so I only donate to known charities.
This is sadly a blind spot for a lot of people. Some of my favorite artists have been sharing their posts, apparently not noticing how the pitch for money is worded identically between a dozen ostensibly different people.
I'm probably being too paranoid, but part of me wonders if that's an anti-palestinian disinformation effort. Like get people to assume that the entire thing is fake based on bad or broken bot posts.
That's not the only part where they're incompetent. Due to how Bluesky works, they didn't have an algorithm to boost them, so none of their bullshit tweets EVER got any likes. So they started liking each other's posts... EXACTLY five times each, not four, not six, ever.
Incompetent madlibs got me in trouble in high school. My friend wrote a mail bomb to fill up my inbox, but the templating was broken. I made a working one to fill up his inbox and ... he reported me and I was banned from using the Internet for 3 months. That's how they get you!
this is great! thank you for your service. when they're not n your notifications its fun to see them. in the old days when I was an exec recruiter, i saved the worst Linkedin photos I could find. you wouldn't believe what folks would add.
Oh, yes, we ran into this botnet and were instrumental in orchestrating the campaign to label it as spam (and thus hide it by default). Also discovered they were spoofing likes on each other's skeets (but no more or less than 5 likes each). https://bsky.app/profile/hermes.cx/post/3lg3yvwljnk2k
Ha! That's not a match to any of the exact patterns I've seen before and real people do do it "ironically" (which I fucking hate), so I won't list it, but also lol
not specific to this theme but i’ve gotten a lot of them lately & i feel like this is a fair place to ask: the accounts where it’s just one post and that post is wordless and two pics—are people just dropping stuff into a template to generate a profile? are they gearing up to run a specific scam?
Those are usually romance scammers (and often the variety that we call pig-butchers for how aggressive they are about "using the whole pig" aka taking every penny their victims have). They are looking for new friends to share their wildly successful investment strategies with!
The more you learn about them, the more depressing they get. This pattern is mostly trafficked people in Southeast Asia with a person with a gun standing over them :/
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on the other hand, i feel i should have seen this coming
https://bsky.app/profile/graciebon256.bsky.social
I... I think her bosom is CGI? There's something weird going on in that pic.
At least I don't use the pipe symbol I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"Generate a story that makes people feel sympathetic."
*looks up account*
It was not, in fact, a real person doing a bit, lol.
Now I have to look at random sketchy profiles to find these, like Easter eggs of incompetence.