u/Perfect_Pudding_5251 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Who is the Reddit account? I’m curious. They really posted a job to post about you?
u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
I have dozens of screenshots and PDFs,.HTMl logs etc...but I don't have time to bundle it up, and I would also prefer discussing it with their team privately first so they can respond.
If they apologized and assured me it would never happen again I might just drop it.
The person's Reddit account was permanently suspended along with dozens of other accounts and a number of official Codesmith accounts as well. When all of the accounts were suspended I also noticed a bunch of accounts that have been harassing me for a year now for suspended too and since then I have had relatively little harassment on here.
I would love to publish a case study some time because the behavior is insane and hard to tell at first!
But revelaing this might also help the bad guys get away with it by understanding the sophistacted techniques I used :(
The fake accounts would warm up by posting and commenting on generic things in large public channels and then post somewhere like 'I live in Denver, what's a good tire repair shop?' And then another fake account would be like 'Go to X for sure, best place'.
A number of these accounts were commenting on fake comments on Codesmith posts as well.
If you go to AMAs from many months ago you'll see a ton of comments collapsed, deleted, or accounts suspended.
A bunch of top level posts in the Codesmith sub were these people, including one disparaging my company and another poll about what people want to see in the sub.
These accounts tried to get me suspended from Reddit as well and ironically they got suspended.
It's possible the creator of the Codesmith sub herself is a fake account too who and one of these fake accounts associated with the Upwork guy claimed to be her partner and went after me - I never proved that but her email address is codesmith[redacted]@gmail.com
I found it fascinating because you wouldn't think this stuff is fake at first. And even then, some of the stuff I would have no clue if it wasn't for the fake accounts history.
For example one of the accounts harassing me seemed like a totally normal alumni who didn't like me but their comments history was commenting on all the other marketing threads for these accounts like for flowers, custom suits, hemorrhoid cream, etc... and intermixed are non marketing posts like about sports and stuff.