John Schinnerer
1 min readJan 21, 2024

--

There's more than a few of these bogus accounts doing this. Thanks for putting this out as a full article.

I get these phishing 'responses' every so often on comments I post. There are various clues that it's a scam.

One is, as you identified, the attempted obfuscation of the platform they want you to contact them on with periods, to try and get past whatever algorithms scan comment text for suspicious content.

Another is that the 'response' is trivial and generic, like "nice response!" and then immediately the phishing pitch.

Another is that every time I go to look at the 'response' on the platform, there is no such response. I get the email notification of the response, which shows me the phishing message. But there is no response on the platform. Presumably they post to trigger the email notice, and then delete the response right away to remove the evidence from the platform.

The typos and mismatched social media handles you mention are also clues, if present.

The first time I got such a message I ignored it. The second time I went to see it on the platform and it was not there. So I went to the poster's profile, which said it had been suspended for violation of ToS - also a major clue. I just got another a few days ago, same thing with that account.

The humorous part, for me, is that I don't use that platform anyhow so they're wasting their time. Or rather, their 'response' bot is wasting a few microseconds of CPU time.

--

--

John Schinnerer
John Schinnerer

Written by John Schinnerer

A generalist in a hyper-specialized society. "How we do what we do is who we are becoming." - Humberto Maturana