Mhi Atinii

I'm sure ten bajillion people are seeing accounts like this given the number of @ comments they're making to show up in people's activity, but at the risk of being redundant:

say hi to the most classic phish attempt I've seen in quite a while

People at my institute's IT security desk would be waving bingo cards around if they saw this thing.

Impersonating an official account

An offer of a perk or monetary bonus

Ingratiating language: the recipient is a very important person and deserves special treatment.

Placing time pressure on the recipient to make it harder to engage in critical thinking

Directing you to leave official channels and therefore begin communicating with only the scammer on a platform they control

A link that doesn't lead to the address written in the message text (see lower left)

Use of a link shortening/redirect service to disguise the actual location the link will go to, even if you examine the address

Literally directing people to enter their payment information i mean come on

Just enough shitty formatting to make savvy people laugh at it, but just enough of a patina of legitimacy to create confirmation bias in marks: i.e, the phenomenon where people form a mental model of a situation, and then disregard all evidence contrary to that model. If a mark sees this and decides this is legit, they'll be more likely to discount any further red flags once they're barreling toward getting their credit card emptied out.

You don't need to try to become a public expert on Venezuela or Maduro based on reading half the Wikipedia page or scrolling the Bluesky tags. You don't need to state any opinion on the former political situation of Venezuela at all. It's okay for now to admit that you know fuck all about it, or to just not speak on it.

An opinion like 'The US shouldn't use blatantly false evidence as an excuse to attack a country for purely selfish reasons' is a full opinion that doesn't require knowing exactly what was up in the country being attacked.

[Zenfield]

Zeno is not immune to Safari's charm 🦓

Alt version with Angel!Zeno and Devil!Safari:

“When am I ever not energized?”

“Certain mornings.”