I recently received a DM on Twitter, this person claimed to have known me growing up and had a surprising amount of personal information some of which I don't recall ever having posted online. I have a very good memory of my childhood and know for a fact that I never knew this person.
The persons profile was strangely convincing, it was hyper-local to my neighborhood growing up. This account had existed for something like 4 or 5 years and had posts going back at least a few. It was almost convincing. The tell was just that their posts were too targeted, all "Hey, local event is going on" "Hey, local politics thing" with no other thoughts expressed. Their replies section was just littered with replies to people about how things were "awesome" or "great news" without any critique or thought.
The whole thing was very unsettling. It was the first scam where I really felt like it would have been easy to fall for with a standard amount of critical thinking. If I had a hazier recollection of my childhood I might have.
I can't imagine this bot was made specifically for me, I'm not that important, but certainly people in my area. I genuinely wonder if this is part of some larger network of hyper-local bots. I don't look forward to the attacks to come as AI progresses.
Scammers tend to create ecosystems of fake accounts in large cities or communities, such as the expat community in Paris.
These are easy to fabricate and maintain, and consist of a social network of individuals who are either loosely connected or constantly changing.
They use these accounts to collect data about key people, events, meet-ups and news events.They have developed a full lifecycle for these accounts. Creation, enrichment, data collection, then consumption and end of life when they are used for scams.
They are playing the long game.