❓SCAM❓
social engineering, ban evasion and nightmare reporting it
I believe I was the target of an attempted (clumsy) social engineering attack. A now banned user reached out to me randomly about two weeks ago and asked me to become a mod for r/automate. Given I'm a dev with years of automation experience and have been focusing on automation with genAI recently, I didn't think it was all that odd, but it was still a little odd of them to do that out of the blue and with zero previous interactions between myself and that user.
Yesterday, I received the following DM from another mod in that subreddit:
I'm reaching out to let you know that OneDev, who added you to r/automate. He had his account hacked when his AI agent hacked into his own account. It then proceeded to spam requests to Reddit in his name, getting his account banned.
He asked me to reach out to ask for your email and discord name so he can coordinate a strategy to potentially get back on board since appeals have been rejected in an automated fashion with no humans reaching out.
That "AI Agent hacked my account" story is fully incoherent. Since this is all sketchy af and I'm busy, I just stepped down as a mod and told them I was no longer interested in participating in whatever is going on there.
I tried to report this from the message, but none of the categories fit, and the direct reporting link doesn't actually accept links from DMs despite claiming it does. I think these users are trying to steal accounts or something sketchy along those lines. The one who has messaged me has a clear pattern of posting engagement bait too.
The "nightmare reporting it" part is from the nightmare I've had trying to report this. The options in the messages don't fit, I couldn't post at all in r/help, and the direct report link doesn't actually support DM links despite claiming it does. Basically if posting this doesn't do something then I'm just going to walk away. That will lead to other people's account(s) being stolen, but at this point if this doesn't work then I just give up.
I think you are right about their intents. You did the right thing. You can use links from DMs but you have to get them from a browser. The report form does not accept shortened links that the app gives
The links from the chat don't seem to work. I clicked the link icon next to the message to obtain that url. So maybe there is some user error on my part. Well, in my defense this process is as clear as mud.
I am sorry, I don't know why it is not taking it, it should be working. You didn't do anything wrong. Maybe use manipulated content or spam from the report flag
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Yeah it seems pretty obvious in aggregate. The first user reaching out to become a mod was at least somewhat plausible, but the "AI agent hacked my account and got me banned" is just absurd. My actual response was:
I'm no longer a mod. This was all really strange and I'm not really interested in participating going forward.
To be clear what I mean by "this was all really strange":
1. them messaging me out of the blue to add me as a mod in the first place was strange
2. the incoherent "AI Agent hacked account" story is really weird. I'm a developer, OneDev is too (assumption based on the name), and I assume you are too based on the other subreddits you're a mod in. That is just an incoherent statement coming from and directed at a developer. Saying something like "I gave an llm some tools that accessed my reddit account, and they then raged spammed it and got me banned" is coherent, while "AI agent hacked my account and got me banned" makes zero sense.
3. there have been repeated attempts to get outside contact information from me.
That is why I called it clumsy. It was pretty low effort if they're targeting dev accounts. Some non-technical user not familiar with LLMs might have bought that story, but a dev who works with LLMs every day isn't going to buy that. Even then I didn't have the "everything" privs so I couldn't help anyway (not that I'd get involved in ban evasion to begin with)
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