Social Engineering Special Olympics
Judging these events is akin to kicking puppies, minus the empathy angle ...
There has been an irregular flow of alerts on my name since I locked myself out of my Twitter account nrauhauser for good at the end of March. I see nitwits working their way backward down the timeline, looking for something that might draw a response. There are a couple creepy hags that seem like they’ve got some money riding on figuring out how to get my attention. I know why I used Twitter, and why I stuck around years longer than was wise. I can’t figure out precisely what is driving those two menopausal fruit loops, but it makes me lol.
LinkedIn is another story entirely. I got another silly pretext approach in late June and it was just too funny to not screen shot.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Writing this will probably contribute to the notion that I’m just a juvenile delinquent with an AARP card. I ain’t even sorry.
#SESO2024:
There used to be periodic outbursts of these bad pretext approaches and I took to calling them the Social Engineering Special Olympics and hashtagging them #SESO.
The fake female infiltrator practice started with a guy named Tom Ryan running a persona called Robin Sage, clear back before Occupy. Literally EVERYBODY had to try this and nobody had any success. That was primarily due to chan culture Zoomer boys assuming what fascinates them would be an excellent guide to what would interest someone their father’s age.
This latest thing is likely another attempt by the operator of “Jack Waterloo”, a failpersona that got skewered in Crack Babies of Kiwi Farms, and the failure mode here is similar to what was covered in Dispelling Delusions Of Adequacy.
I’m not going to explain this in detail, since the failpersona operator does follow this Substack. I’ll just mark the things that would instantly tip off a professional adult, but to which someone with an hourly job that involves a uniform with a name tag would be oblivious.
Cute as the proverbial button, ain’t she? This profile photo fills me with desire … to give her a pat on the head … and then ask if her mom is single.
I was going to just play it through to see what’s on the other end of this …
But LinkedIn picked up on the fakery and terminated the account.
Conclusion:
This encounter is something I’d normally capture and store like this.
But in this case the timing of the approach is interesting. I don’t think this is connected to the movement in the shadows, but now it’s part of the permanent record. This is an analyst’s cognitive defense move - without an event log with date/time stamps, our brains will naturally make a coherent story using the pieces of information we have available. That worked really well when we lived as hunter gatherer bands dodging big cats on the African savanna. Today, even if you spend a lot of time in deceptive, hazardous environments, that wiring will make mistakes.
Later this year those screen shots are liable to end up in a shared folder, with a group of people going through them with a fine tooth comb, looking for signal amidst all the noise. The first pass always involves tossing about a quarter of the record as being irrelevant to the task at hand. Natalie here is probably a toss, but she’s preserved, just in case this clumsy approach is part of some larger scheme.
And on that note, I can now returning to quietly lurking …