this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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Nicoled
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Hi, I'm Nicole! But you can call me the Fediverse Chick :D
For when you or others get nicoled.
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She's either autistic or the victim of some kind of obsessional person. Imagine a friendship or relationship ending and you use the photos and personal info you have to... Make the person a laughing stock? Ruin their reputation? Make them a cult weirdo? All without this person knowing. Or maybe the plan is for her to find out eventually? I think she looks eastern European.
This left me thinking. What if the person behind this actually has nudes of her, but is waiting for critical mass or even her identity to come up before extortion? She could be getting blackmailed already for all we know, "look, every day more and more people are getting familiar with your looks... Would be a shame if those nudes got leaked"
Same thought. This seems more likely. Especially with new photos being dropped in different clothes.
Polish, perhaps?
Yes! Now you said it she looks very similar to a polish woman I know.
is her name Nicole? does she live in Toronto?
No, wrong name, she's married and has lighter hair. Her facial features are very similar though, and I think unusual for england.
In the message it says she is a Polish girl so pretty much confirmed
Oh right, I'd forgotten that. Still, I guess it means something that she looks polish.
If it was a plan to ruin their reputation, why on lemmy where there are like 4 people?
Also how is this possibly ruining their reputation? it's not sexually suggestive, links don't work, and it's plain obvious whoever is in the photo is also not the person sending the messages
Let’s say you had something compromising on someone. There’s so much smut out there that that alone might not be “fun” enough to torture your target with. It’d probably get lost in all the noise of the internet.
If you instead, spread their image in an ARG style campaign, you’ve now got an entire forum of people who would identify the compromising material as “Nicole.”
There’s entire creators online that focus on internet oddities. If you really wanted to torture someone, you could make their face specifically known for a separate reason (here, cover is a romance scam that goes nowhere.)
I’m not saying this is happening here. But if you truly wanted to harass someone and gain coercive control over them, this would be a pretty effective way to do that without sharing the compromising payload.
Which, we might consider this might be a coercion tactic towards the victim in addition to a targeted harassment.
As in, “See look all these people know your face now. They’re all looking for you. Do what I want and I won’t share the compromising material.”
Blackmail.
Lack of censorship?
I was inclined to believe it could be a pig-butchering scam, but your theory is just as plausible. One of the reasons I'll never post photos online.
If some kind of money based scam was going on, the perpetrator would be a criminal. This way, are they a criminal? Is impersonation with no financial gain or fraud a crime? It's like revenge porn but there's no porn. What wrongdoing is being committed under the law?
It seems to depend on location, but from what I could find, impersonation does go against the Computer Misuse Act of 1990 which is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Unless the account owner is using a VPN, it's possible the instance administrators could see where the account owner is based via IP. If it is against the law where the account owner is based, the authorities could contact the account owner's ISP. Under certain conditions the ISP may tell the authorities exactly which address held that IP at a given time.