Gmail/Voice Account: Use It, Or Lose It!
Long term low intensity persona are in danger.
Yesterday in Grifter: Richard Anderson Sharp III I mentioned that there’s an Android here that has some stuff on it - a persona that was to do with things in Ukraine.
This is the device in question.
This device dates back to September of 2023 and was purchased specifically due to the aforementioned grifter. It got the usual treatment:
Prepaid AT&T Android
Gmail
Google Voice
Authy
Cake Wallet
LinkedIn profile
Signal account
Wire account
What I found this morning is that the Google Voice expired a couple months ago and the Gmail itself was suspended at the start of this month. The Authy and Signal continue to run with the number I no longer control. Weirdly, LinkedIn seems perfectly happy with this situation.
I can not prove anything, but my working theory is that if you do all of these things, use the persona for a few days, then let it sit, the fraud detection algos decide it’s sus and squishes it. This is not the only one of these things that perished in this fashion, it’s just the latest that I’ve noticed.
What is the path to a sustainable presence?
I have one of these that had a couple of years of divorce & custody case work. It’s used all the things it has on at least a quarterly basis.
How are social bot farms doing this?
Strength in numbers. If you make a new account and don’t have family, friends, and coworkers to add, that’s the danger zone. I’ve run into LinkedIn Arcologies - whole tribes of obvious fakes that have a geographic locus and one or two large companies that tie them together. People are trying to do this now with AI generated profiles, which I think are fooling LinkedIn’s automation, but now human with any experience would need more than sixty seconds to spot them.
This is good, in that the various major online identity players are continuing to improve their ability to interdict accounts engaged in odd usage patterns. If you think you might need such a thing, you should probably NOT assume that you can just go get a burner and get into action.
So go get a prepaid phone this weekend and get the seasoning process started now. Try to find a permissive social environment that will let you quickly add new contacts. You don’t need to keep the carrier number but you do need to have some SMS traffic on a Google Voice number to keep it viable, and be aware that if the associated phone vanishes they get curious. The next time I have to do something like this I think I’m going to get a Tracfone and see how their ninety day plans fare. I suspect numbers that only exist for thirty days are a red flag.
One thing I have not yet tried is having a “teenager” that needs not just a phone and social media accounts, but one that actually needs a kid’s debit card with their name on it. This approach wouldn’t work for the sort of operation described in Phone Pharm Phakery, the price per persona would be too high. This approach wouldn’t work for fraud to the level that there would be search warrants, it’ll be too entangled with the real you. But for nosing around online without weirdos like Sharp following you home, it would be just right …