I guess Lemmy has finally made it! It's popular enough to attract catfishers.

I really wish we could disable PMs from anyone but admins or mods of comms we subscribe to, like you can on reddit. There will never be a day when I want to receive a PM from anyone on Lemmy. It's nothing personal, there's lots of cool people here, but I'm not interested in being pen pals. I'm just here for the public forum.
- Ooh! You sound sexy and I definitely want to be your pen pal! I’ve sent you a DM!
  Also, I have a great business opportunity for you if you’re interested! Have you ever heard of NFTs?
  NFTs went away for a while because of crime and scams, but they fixed all those problems I swear. NFTs are the sexiest investment a sexy person could make, and they’re even better now that the leaders are implementing AI! It’s going to be revolutionary! It’s like E = Mc2, but now it’s E = Mc2 + AI. It’s the bees knees! It’ll make Stephen Hawking blush! I’ll help broker it for you, and if you send me 1 NFT, I will send you 2 back just because I like you.
  Can’t wait for your reply!! ❤️
  
  like E = Mc2, but now it’s E = Mc2 + AI
  Aaaaaaaa. Thanks, I hate it. You successfully trolled me.
- Just pm'd you asking for more deets.
  
  If we were on Reddit, OP's inbox would get flooded with messages, but Lemmy isn't active enough for that...
- Goddamn it. I was just about to send you a gif of my genitals.
- Asl
  
  30ish / nonbinary per presidential decree / Land of the Free™_{(Terms and conditions apply)}

I didn't get one 😔
- I can catfish you if you want
  
  Me next.
- I did. I didn’t think it was a catfish though. I assumed it was some person promoting their streaming shit. Kinda smart, a smaller, mostly nerdy community of niche interests.
  Doesn’t mean I didn’t block them though.

Or come hang out with us at room/hell
- -- Comedy Heaven

The only girl in the fediverse
- She's a superhero. Fediverse Girl!
- I think the ratio of trans to cis women on Lemmy is about even

Got 4 copies of it, I don't even know how to send a message to "all" here, didn't think it was possible.
- The API is pretty open. you can write a script that sends individual messages to however many people you like
  
  Neither of the apps I use lets me do anything beyond read the message and mark it as read. Is there a profile setting to disable that shit? I have to log into my fucking desktop just to delete the stupid phishing message.

I thought this was funny
- Imagine unwarping the face 😆

As a mod in other coomunities, please report these as quickly as you can. They can generally be taken care of quickly.
- I had this aswell. Will do.

Yay I feel loved, just got my one of these!
- I got it to. Did they send it to everyone? And exactly how would you do that?
  
  I got it too!
  
  A scripted "bot".
  Scrape all the names from this post, PM them this message.
- Well you shouldn’t feel loved.
  This has nothing to do with you as a person and I would never want you to feel loved undeservedly. Because I care about you.
  (Please don’t take my overwhelming kindness in the wrong way and feel as if you’re receiving any kind of love from me. As previously stated, it has nothing to do with you and everything to do with me being an excellent person.)
  
  I was being sarcastic ...
  It's like saying you feel loved when a bunch of flies are swarming you or when you get pulled out of line to be screened by airport security or you get some weird reply on dumb comment you made.

Besides all that drama of OP:
Wouldn't that be THE BEST social media community where messages like that would actually happen? I would love to be a part of an open undivisive group of people who would write things like "Hey, I'm Joe, I do this and that and noticed you, lets band if you like" or "I'm jenna, I do the creative work for XY instance, lets connect". That would be really cool. The problem is as always that we can not trust these messages because of the last decade of misuse on various platforms. Even if we take out all the scams, we only accept the right message in the right medium: If someone would write me what OP posted on LinkedIn, I would read it as a business inquire connection (at best). If she would write me that on Tinder&co, I would take it as an avance. If I would get a message like that on facebook, I do not believe in it as a honest request anymore. On Insta I would read it as a scam too. But where is the place where I can get a message like that and trust it as it is the norm in that social network? McLuhan said "The Medium is the Message". We need a Platform/Network/Medium to give a room to actually send a message like that where a connection without the aspect of business or sex is assumed because of the choosen Platform/Network/Medium.
The Fediverse will not solve this problem sadly, as it is mainly just decentralized, but is not out to solve societary tilts and disgraces. But it is nice to think that such a place/site/room could exist (one day?) where a person (even of another gender) could have an exchange like that without bad intentions. As usally, The good ones are silent, and the loud ones are scams.
- The loneliness epidemic in a nutshell: we feel we can't trust people being open and friendly.
  That isn't normal, by the way.
  
  The problem isn't that we feel we can't trust them. It's that we actually can't trust them. Trusting someone that messages you that way is likely to end up with you in a bathtub full of ice, or at the very least, a compromised bank account.
  
  Most people are open and friendly but you have to meet them in real life.
  I signed up for dinner with strangers thing, meeting five random strangers I didn't know before. Every single one was friendly and open about their lives.
  We all need to be very careful not to think social media is real life. Outside of all this, most people are decent, specially when a bit older.
- But where is the place where I can get a message like that and trust it as it is the norm in that social network? McLuhan said “The Medium is the Message”
  I'm not sure this is possible on the internet in general. Even in the early days of facebook people were forced to grow suspicious of their old acquaintances reaching out to say hi only to be hit with some "be your own boss!" MLM schtick, and that was when you could be fairly confident the sender was a real person that you actually have known for some time. Not to mention how suspicious we all are of some of the "living my best life!" type of humble-brag posts that are really just sad people playing pretend.
  Add a layer of anonymity and I'm just not sure genuine trust could ever be possible. Try to take away anonymity and you wander into the quagmire that is personal privacy and still can't avoid the possibility of scams and compromised accounts.
  I think that the Internet as a Medium simply cannot do what we have been trying to force it to do for years - serve as a good "third place" for socialization. Do people make friends here? Absolutely. But people make friends in the ICU, doesn't mean we should install a bar there.
- Wouldn’t that be THE BEST social media community where messages like that would actually happen? I would love to be a part of an open undivisive group of people who would write things like “Hey, I’m Joe, I do this and that and noticed you, lets band if you like” or “I’m jenna, I do the creative work for XY instance, lets connect”. That would be really cool.
  Start c/penpals
- I don't know what drama you think op is introducing
- That’s basically how people introduced themselves on the public discord servers I frequented during the pandemic and it was normal
- Mastadon is this way for me
- No, that's not a thing I would want to be involved with.
- Yeah, but also, such a thing could only result in meaningful physical relationships if the servers/communities have some kind of "local" association. For example, a server for france, one for italy, and one for the netherlands, you know what i mean?
  Otherwise, if you just want to flirt and be silly, i recommend the !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone community comment sections.

Take all my money, random dude on the web.

okay lol i feel less bad for reporting this user now that i know it was widespread
- I got like 8 of those :-/
  
  damn how did they think that was gonna look legit 🤣

Even weirder, a user named "sognar" was posting their picture as a comment.
Seemed odd to me... Comment is removed now.
https://aggregatet.org/u/sognar
- Probably the bot owner setting it up and doing a test post?
  
  Created the same day so seems likely.
  Also, the spammer linked above is now banned.
- Oh so that's why, I reverse searched the image earlier and it linked to that post. Looks like there is another image on that profile now

I got the same lol
- Me too.
- Same here.

I didn't even know pms were a thing mbin until I got that one earlier. No pic on mine, but might be a cross-compatability issue or already the link died

post shoe on head with todays’ newspaper
- What's June got to do with it?

I also just got it.

Got thar same message. Basic policy: ignore.

Shame. I've PM'd a few people and had good conversations.
- Sure, but did you at least add context about why you're messaging them? Like some comment or post they made that you liked and you wanted to talk about similar stuff?
  Because that would be kind of normal. That's what private messages are for. But this one is just bait.
  
  Yeah just a question or a word of encouragement or a recommendation so it didn't seem like I was advertising. I like most things to be publicly posted but not everything. If Lemmy gets a bunch of bot spam PMs, legit ones will be less likely to get a response.

bait could be better.
- What's with that?
  Is a homely looking person supposed to appear less scammy?
  
  Its almost insulting. Its like. Hey. If im gonna be catfished it should be by someone who seems way out of my league. thank you very much.

Thanks for the heads up! I never PM anyone on social media platforms unless I’ve met them in real life and they expressed actual openness to talking to me.

I think that's pretty good, we're reaching the big leagues 🚀 🥳

I, too, was approached by Missy/Nicole.

I thought maybe it vas a weird quirk of friendica, but yeah this seems more focused

I got it too. Looks like maybe they were banned because it disappeared from my inbox

Ayyy we're.....winning?

I've been getting a different one for awhile trying to rope me into a crypto scam

Yeah this was the first thing that i saw in the morning and it was so surreal. I literally woke up, grabbed my smartphone, went to lemmy inbox, and saw this message three times in a row. Clicked through all of them, then fell back to sleep, only to wake up an hour ago and now i see this meme. I guess i wasn't dreaming this up after all.

who is the woman in the picture? I saw a couple stills randomly posted in comments too.

Maybe those who got spammed have something in common? There's no complete list of users on Fediverse, but it could've targeted a list of users it have seen somewhere, or like community admins, or whatever. I haven't been spammed although I have a fairly active acc.
- I got one from her/it yesterday evening. Also a few days before that I got a creepy DM from some rightwinger trying to convince me that there not a fascist Nazi presence and that "people don't even know what those things are as they haven't lived through them".
  Never got a DM before that. My guess is lemmy is big enough or rather left enough for federal intervention and psyops are starting if they haven't already.

i posted this in my instances meta community, im not sure if defederating is the best option, but it sets a warning.

If you think that's new, come on over to the nsfw side of things. We have a whole cast of zany butts.

I just got a couple of these today myself.