Couple of days ago, while fooling around with my phone wasting my time, I got a notification that someone dm-ed me on Twitter, a app that I hate with every fiber of my being yet still use on a daily basis. It was a guy who needed help from me, for some reason.
I immediately smelled bullshit. I’ve been too long in this game not to be suspect. My first thought was that this guy was trying to troll me, so I replied appropriately with ‘‘the fuck dude’’.
He answered with the following.
I immediately realized this POS was trying to scam me because what semi-reputable business would out-source it’s support team to Discord of all websites. Here’s the email he sent me:
This was edited, poorly. You can clearly see at what part of the text he clicked ‘Inspect Element’ on so he could jam the Discord handle in. It doesn’t follow the rest of the email in the slightest, it’s just jarring writing. What also gives him away is the line before the thanks, X which says that the receiver of the email might get banned which doesn’t make sense with the whole ‘‘Help me Twitter, I accidentally reported this poor fellow!’’.
Following his message I felt the need to call him out for his bullshit:
He quickly blocked me following this message.
A day or two after this I decided to scambait someone again after a 2 year break. I added him on Discord on one of my alt accounts. I only have access to my messages because when I sent a edited screenshot he got scared, deleted all his messages and blocked me.
He accepted my friend request, I sent him a message asking for help and he asked me for the handle in the email, which I don’t think is important since I doubt the lazy motherf-er behind this has any willpower to edit several emails and produce several screenshots.
After asking me for some ‘identifying info’ he asked me to ‘kindly’ replace my email to @noreply.fr. I shouldn’t even explain why.
noreply.fr is a domain used by yopmail.com, a popular service for temporary emails.
I called him out on his bullshit saying that normal Twitter support would have access to all accounts and wouldn’t need me to change email to some random-ass French email. But he asked me to kindly follow the protocols so I did. Or did I? I sent him an edited screenshot which probably took as much effort as editing the email. He blocked me and deleted all his messages immediately after that, probably realizing I’m the fellow who called him out on his bullshit in the dms.
During the scambaiting he sent me this image to verify his/hers identity.
He stole the info of some poor girl from Linkedin who very clearly stopped working for Twitter in 2022. I doubt she’s aware this bozo is impersonating her and scamming people.
The goal of this scam is very, very simple - steal Twitter accounts. The reason I didn’t reveal the name of the guy who contacted me is because I believe his account was stolen too, by the same scam, the same person.
To prove that his could be case, here’s another person who got his account stolen, taken from Twitter (x.com/arinsemcontexto)
Here’s the email they got, exactly the same that I got, proving that these scammers are very, very lazy.
And the following are the Discord messages between kizzy shewantsrwvenge and estephaniadesk:
It’s sad to see someone fall for something like this but that’s what happens when someone panics you, scares you that something bad will happen unless you follow their instructions. Even after realising this was a scam designed to steal accounts and get money, kizzy shewantsrwvenge still thought that the report story was real. They are really good at convincing people.
This is not the only story. yoongi_meow94 on Twitter almost lost her account to the same person. Again, they sent the exact same tweet, why bother changing it if it works?
yoongi realised that this was all a scam designed to steal accounts after searching the username on Twitter. Otherwise she would have fell for it and lost her account. In the replies was another person who almost fell for it - MIKROSKOSMISTIC
God knows how many more people fell for it and weren’t able to tweet about it. How many of them did tweet about it and just didn’t mention estephaniadesk. Here’s another example of it that I found just by luck:
This is another variation of it, most probably done by the same people under a different name, this time using the Discord user of michaelandersondeskhelp. Sounds real catchy, doesn’t it?
This person that was almost scammed realised that this was a scam by using ChatGpt. I’m not kidding.
This is who they prey on, people who are obsessed with technology and social media so much that they are giving pet names to their favorite AI service.
Here’s a bunch of more cases of people encountering this exact/similar scam:
And here’s a confirmation by one of the people who sent out messages like these that their account was hacked by the same scam.
This is probably why Twitter is a wasteland right now. Most of the accounts are botted Twitter blue payments who churn out stuff for the 14.99 they get every month from Elon. Accounts that were hacked by estephaniadesk and accounts similar to it immediately started retweeting and churning out AI/botted bullshit left, right and center, ignoring everything that account posted before that and sometimes even rebranding it to something completely different just because.
I created a account yesterday so I could scambait estephaniadesk and get some more info. There’s a 48 hours limit where you can’t change account information, for some reason. I’ll try to send them a grabify link and get some ip adresses or bitcoin addresses they use.