A service called Spy Pet is scraping Discord servers, archiving and tracking users' messages and activity, and then selling access to that data.
Spy Pet scrapes more than 10,000 Discord servers, and besides selling access to anyone with cryptocurrency, it offers the data for training AI models or to assist law enforcement agencies, according to its website.
Spy Pet claims to be tracking more than 14,000 servers, 600 million users, and includes a database of more than 3 billion messages.
If you notice a new account on your instance has a seemingly "real" name attached to their account, it might seem strange at first, but do yourself and Fedi a favor and google that name.
There's some here that are scammers trying to impersonate famous people from somewhat niche entertainment media. Just this morning there was an account registered on a small instance with the name of a professional wrestler.
Thankfully this person had the misfortune of grabbing my attention (wrestling fan) immediately in my timeline and I notified the admin of the potential scam and we were able to mitigate any real harm.
You may not be so fortunate as this in the future.
Some even go so far as to attempt to impersonate lesser known athletes from other professional sports and try to get gullible fans of the team or sport to give them money.
Be safe out there and do your due diligence. It just might save you, your users, or other Fedi users from getting scammed out of their hard earned money.
Thanks for coming to my FED talk. PLEASE boost for reach. This is important.
@BeAware Understandable that it's annoying, but this is what's happening on every single instance allready, it's just logic. And for the sake of federation I think it would be good to have it fedi-wide.
I mean for sure you wouldn't like it when you work your follower list and then somebody on another more popular instance duplicates your name and starts to take your fame which you build up with fedi-wide hashtags.
«But the factor that predicts whether someone is connable […] [is] their desperation. The kid selling drugs on the corner, the mom desperately DMing her high-school friends to sell them leggings, the cousin who insists that you get in on their shitcoin – they're all doing it because the system is rigged against them, and getting worse every day.» @pluralistic on why the #scammers are the #MLM-scammees. A must-read. https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week
"while we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job"