Fake followers and all that kind of noxious shit

[Barry Admin]

New thing I've noticed on Xbox. I'm honestly a cunt-hair away from quitting the internet for good ass it's absolutely over-run by bastards now! Anyway, it's the same sort of shit I used to see on twitter, also described as a catfish.

You take a screenshot or make a clip, and it gets liked by a random - a random with an avatar pic of a real-life hot chick. I looked at the profile of one the other night (ARTIS7 187 now renamed to Ms Elena). 575 gamer score, no captures of their own, now up to 8370 followers. Sits on the feeds of new games all day, hitting the like button on everything that is posted. Has a pinned update saying "love is all I have to offer" with heart icons in it. Account looks to be ten days old, but has already amassed 8370 horny followers, even though that afore-mentioned pinned update is full of people like me warning that it's actually a dude.

Heh the latest comments are along the lines of "LeMmE sMaSh" and rows of heart icons.

Yeah anyway, if you have kids or young siblings or whatever, warn 'em. I'm sure guys like this then start hacking the followers, or social engineer them into giving them money etc.

[Barry Admin]

There are also people who just sit taking "arty" GTA screenshots on Xbox, and they clog up the "trending" stuff with this awful Facebook rubbish. Like they'll take a picture of an attractive GTA character, or of a sunset and then add text to it like "don't tell me the sky is the limit when there are footprints on the moon." FUCK OFF MATE. I think some of these accounts are actually real, they're just absolutely desperate to have the most "friends" or "followers" on whatever service they're using. Honestly, I just can't stand the direction the internet has gone in.

[mobias]

Does the Playstation have its own equivalent of this? Or is it Xbox exclusive?

Anyway yeah generally speaking the whole thing about sharing stuff being put so centrally in how we engage online these days is really exhausting.

I told someone at work the other day that I own three cats and they pretty much asked immediately whether they have their own instagram account?! And if not why not was the implication.

[Consignia]

Does the Playstation have its own equivalent of this? Or is it Xbox exclusive?

Yeah, I some how ended up friends with Spammers on PSN, one of those innoucus looking people at first, so my I got pulled into group chats with 100s of people spamming shit like buying bootleg PSN cards. I had to turn off notifications on my PS4 it got so bad it interrupted my Blu-ray play back.

I do hate all this social shit on consoles. I just let me play games.

[Space ghost]

just set it so your feed only displays your friends content and people/games that you've chosen to follow

[kngen]

Does the Playstation have its own equivalent of this? Or is it Xbox exclusive?

Was playing Fifa the other day and a message alert popped up saying 'Message from HawtBabe69xxx: Hiya Honey. What u up to? LOL xxx' and I thought: Oh fucking nice one Playstation. That could have made for an awkward conversation if my wife could stand to be in the same room as me when I'm trying to win the Bundesliga

Need to sort my security settings then ...

[Neomod]

Thank god the 360 doesn't have this feature. It seems to happen on all social media these days, even Soundcloud ffs.

[TheManOne]

I keep getting spammed on PS4 by bots telling me how to get "FREE CODEZ!" and yet, the two times I've reported them as spam I've been told they're not and I could be banned if I keep reporting them as spam.

[momatt]

I wonder what proportion of the internet is spam garbage?  It's got to be at least 90% now.

I get spam followers and likes on Instagram, but that's harmless enough and can be avoided with security settings.  Spam friend requests on Soundcloud and Facebook, ok I can ignore those fine.
But I do find it all a bit bleak and depressing.  There must be loads of fake robot accounts following each other and sending each other fake messages on a loop forever.  Fucking cunts.

My company has a message board forum that we had to shut down due to the hundreds of spam requests we got from Russia and China.  It would have been a full-time job sorting that shit out, so we just decided to not bother.
Then there was a great music/art forum that recently closed down for similar reasons.  The spam outnumbered the proper posts 10:1 so they gave up and closed the lot down.

Can't these cunts do the world a favour and just jump off a bridge somewhere?
No I don't want your porn or your viagra or your fucking fake designer handbags.  Utter shithead scum.

[Barry Admin]

Bump. This shit is back, and worse than ever. Is there no way of customising the "Community" page on Xbox now, after the absolute shithouse dashboard update? All these catfish cunts are uploading pictures of women in their skimpies, and I just don't want it on my Xbox, all I want is funny or interesting clips of people I know playing games.

[Viero_Berlotti]

I work for a company that sells through the Amazon marketplace, and fake customer reviews are just turning the whole platform to shit. Basically cheap tat companies monitor the best selling products and then produce crappy knock off versions, but flood their listings with hundreds of fake 5 star reviews. This is completely against the Amazon TOS but they seem powerless against it. These listings then command the top slots in search results. We used to sell really well on Amazon and played by the rules, slowly building listings up with legitimate customer reviews. This strategy just isn't possible now, and all our listings are languishing in no-mans land. So unless you break the Amazon TOS and pay for a company to farm fake reviews you won't get anywhere, it's just a race to the bottom now.

[Jerzy Bondov]

You can finally turn off notifications if you're watching a video on PS4 now.

[Cloud]

Yeah I get loads of that on Twitter.

As for "lemme smash" the meme comes from this

https://youtu.be/-TcLxlkc2pA

[Blue Jam]

I work for a company that sells through the Amazon marketplace, and fake customer reviews are just turning the whole platform to shit. Basically cheap tat companies monitor the best selling products and then produce crappy knock off versions, but flood their listings with hundreds of fake 5 star reviews. This is completely against the Amazon TOS but they seem powerless against it. These listings then command the top slots in search results. We used to sell really well on Amazon and played by the rules, slowly building listings up with legitimate customer reviews. This strategy just isn't possible now, and all our listings are languishing in no-mans land. So unless you break the Amazon TOS and pay for a company to farm fake reviews you won't get anywhere, it's just a race to the bottom now.

Slightly related, but if a seller uses the Fulfilled By Amazon service, Amazon delete all negative reviews, replacing them with "This was fulfilled by Amazon so the review of this seller does not apply and Amazon take full responsibility" or something. I noticed this when I bought a product and the seller added my email address to a mailing list and sent me a load of spam and requests for positive reviews- and then my negative review mentioning all of this got deleted, even though Amazon were responsible for the delivery, but not for the customer service.

This is of course an incentive to get more sellers to use Fulfilled By Amazon, and it's why all those seller have 100% positive feedback which tells you absolutely nothing about them.

Amazon really need to stop giving out customers' email addresses to sellers and get people to contact each other through the site, like eBay do. Of course, eBay's feedback system is also borked but that's a whole other thread...

[Blue Jam]

Back on topic, has anyone else started getting more of those "Hi, my name is [Russian woman's name], check out my pics  ♥ ❤ ❥ ❣ ❦ ❧"-type spam emails of late? I thought they were a relic but I've had loads lately.

[Lee Van Cleef]

I've had a couple follow me on xbox but ignored them. Is there a reason for them doing this? How are they trying to scam you?

[Barry Admin]

Generally through social engineering.

Hi, I'm a hot chick with banging jubblies and a tight rat, oh I don't have any new games :-( can you give me vouchers so I can buy new games and I will show you a nip or even maybe flash my clam?

I imagine it's along those lines.