facts I know for sure:
- The same DM has been mass sent from probably over 100 different Fediverse instances, since around Jan 31 2025 to this day.
- The DM has some pointedly specific details about Nicole the Fediverse Chick (Polish girl from Toronto, studying pre-health).
- The putative university varies (Toronto Metropolitan University, George Brown College).
- The DM uses nerd lingo ("Fediverse Chick") and points to several nerdy/non-mainstream social media spaces attributted to "Nicole" (friendica, discord, matrix, stumblechat).
- "Nicole" accounts so far have never responded to contacts, or to my knowledge ever tried to scam or bait or even talk to followers in any way.
- The chat rooms (discord, matrix) are abandoned. The admin "Nicoles" never post anything.
- As of yesterday, my "Nicole" DMs are pointing to a Friendica at namestaci.cz. There are also Friendicas at friendica.world (3 times), my-place.social, friendica.io, poliverso.org.
- The Friendica accounts expose a putative work address in Toronto, publicly (!!).
- There's many different photos for "Nicole". All appear to be the same woman and not AI-generated. All are very low quality; someone suggested early 2000s webcam photos, but they look more like video stills to me. Many of the photos clearly group together into the same source video, same outfit etc.
- The namestaci.cz Friendica posted a photo two days ago, titled "My dad's office. He works in renovation and always has a lot going on." This, too, is low quality like a video still.
- The friendica.world accounts have a few dozen photos, most of them seemingly random stills from the videos. (edit: many look like, random or automated/sneak shots from the ceiling or awkward angles etc.)
- At some point there were "Nicole" Peertube instances. I've watched one cached video, said to be about "hanging out around work"; it shows probably the woman from the photos, walking in the cold somewhere consistent with the Friendica work address. She was talking in the video, but the version I found had no audio.
- At some point there were "Nicole" "live" streams. Reports are that it was some video of the same woman, on loop.
- Reportedly, at some point her Matrix room had the topic "I work at the ****. Come say hi sometime! I work in the **** section, so just ask for Nicole!" This has since been removed.
the more I look at this, the more I think it's targeted harassment of an actual Nicole. either by someone she knows like a vengeful ex, or by 4chan-style trolls who got their hands on a few video clips and personal details.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.