Post #477362

2026-03-01 16:56 UTC

Head&#39;s up, Mastodon users: There appears to be a coordinated effort to impersonate relatively high-profile people who have accounts on various instances but who have not used them in a while. I&#39;ve gotten several follow notifications - and a couple of DMs - from impersonators of people I know. The bogus accounts have lots of underscores in the handles, and they repost items from the past, sometimes years old. If you spot this, please report, do not engage, and then block. Pls boost.

Replies (15)

@Thor@indieweb.social 2026-03-01 18:15

@dsilverman@mastodon.social thanks for letting everyone know. I shared it with the IndieWeb.social community just now.

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@FlashMobOfOne@mstdn.social 2026-03-01 18:25

@dsilverman@mastodon.social I only know one celeb who follows plebs: the great Diana Prince.

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@rk@mastodon.well.com 2026-03-01 18:27

@dsilverman@mastodon.social I’m on clone number four or five of a friend of mine. They create an account, use his bio and profile pic, retoot a couple of my toots that my friend had liked, and then DM me to ask if I’ve heard of Bitcoin

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@gl33p@mastodon.social 2026-03-01 18:28

@dsilverman@mastodon.social I've seen and reported several of these pod-person clone accounts, for one particular account four of them so far FWIW, I decided not to block them because (in theory) that could signal to whoever is doing this that their cloned accounts should stop following me to evade getting reported They seem to be after relatively credentialed credible sorts of people too

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@gimulnautti@mastodon.green 2026-03-01 19:59

@dsilverman@mastodon.social I had this pulled on my by several pro-Russian accounts operating from chinese servers in 2024. It’s nasty!

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@oberstenzian@mastodon.social 2026-03-01 21:51

@dsilverman@mastodon.social This is a deliberate effort to enshittify our platform.

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@BorisBarbour@mastodon.social 2026-03-01 22:42

@dsilverman@mastodon.social I tried to reply as if I had been taken in, but what/whoever is running them is not really up to holding a conversation.

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@Mage_of_Chaos@mastodon.social 2026-03-01 23:59

@dsilverman@mastodon.social PLEASE KNOW I am not impersonating anyone, I started here for the first time with these underscores. Lol.

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@the_turtle@mastodon.sdf.org 2026-03-02 00:31

@dsilverman@mastodon.social all I got today was somebody looking for money. Nobody who followed me, nobody I followed, nobody I'd ever seen post anywhere, in a private mention. I thought those were restricted to mutual follows. Blocked.

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@DonChacale@mastodon.social 2026-03-02 01:10

@dsilverman@mastodon.social well done. thank you.

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@patricus@gts.posix.live 2026-03-02 06:45

@dsilverman@mastodon.social I'll report if I find any, to the instance admins they're on

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@juglugs@mastodon.social 2026-03-02 06:45

@emsquared@social.coop No, no, no, you never boost anything where the OP asks you to boost... It's the first rule of anti-SPAM posting 😂. Unless you have been the target, personally, of the said problem, boosting just makes you part of the SPAM problem.

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@diverdutch@mastodon.social 2026-03-02 08:07

@dsilverman@mastodon.social Thanks for the heads up! Also, not a bot here but did follow you just now as I followed you forever on the bird-site and miss the link to houston on my timeline

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@Scubyw@mastodon.nz 2026-03-02 10:10

@dsilverman@mastodon.social https://mastodon.social/@dsilverman/116154971051282021 Some advise: Don't follow high-profile people. They usually haven't got anything interesting to spout.

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@Mons1serrata@mastodon.social 2026-03-07 09:19

@dsilverman@mastodon.social 👍🏽

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