A January Question
------------------

Christina asks, "What do you do when someone you don't know
on a social or business network site tries to become a
"friend" or otherwise connected to you?"[1]

These days Mastodon is the only social network I'm on. I
keep a pretty low profile so I'm not often troubled by
suspicious follow requests (even Nicole, the Fediverse
Chick, passed me by). Even so, I'm still pretty careful. I
always visit the account of the person making the request,
and evaluate their recent posting history before
accepting. I would never accept a follow request from a
stranger with a brand new account.

That said, one suspicious actor did manage to slide under my
radar recently.  On Boxing Day morning I received a DM from
a person I thought I recognized, a fellow librarian (call
him "FL") from back east, explaining that he was posting
from an alternate account because he'd been locked out of
his old account due to a phone virus.

I was a bit surprised, for two reasons:

1. FL was part of the sizeable contingent in my profession
who had set up Mastodon accounts in late 2022 when it was
briefly fashionable to do so, and then immediately decamped
to Bluesky when that became What Everybody Was Doing a short
while later. Still, maybe this was a good thing?  If he was
back on Mastodon that might be a sign others too would soon
be returning.

2. While we were professionally acquainted, FL wasn't the
sort of acquaintance who I would expect to send me DMs.

Nevertheless, I replied to the effect that it was nice to
hear from him, and wished him a happy Boxing Day.

And he wrote back, asking if I had heard about Community
Development Block Grants.

Now somewhat suspicious, I said no, I'd not heard of them
and how would they be relevant to my work? 

His reply was evasive, didn't answer my question, and
stressed that I should really look into them.

I have since learned that "government grant scams" are a
well-known ploy on social media, but at the time I'd not
heard of them. Nevertheless, I realised there was no way
this could be FL. Most likely, I thought, someone had cloned
FL's old, disused Mastodon account and was reaching out to
his followers to lure them into some sort of scam. So,
blocked and reported. The account was suspended soon after.

Still, I have questions.

Mainly, Who would go to the bother of setting up a cloned
account for a librarian, and use that to scam other
librarians?  The odds of success are small (librarians tend
to have decent critical thinking skills), and the size of
both the target group (FL's followers on Mastodon) and the
potential reward (librarians tend to be underpaid) is
negligible.  The only way it would make economic sense is if
it was part of a much larger scam, targetting disused
accounts all over the Fediverse, perhaps using an LLM to
generate the DMs.  But I've not heard reports of anything
like that happening.

Puzzling, somewhat. 

Reference
---------

1. January 2026 Five Questions
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~christina/2026-01-5Q.txt


Sun 25 Jan 2026 11:40:42 AM PST