[Safety] A heads up regarding fishy user posts

[Schlingel mit Kringel]

Hey folks,

just a little safety heads up. Over the last weeks i stumbled upon quite legit looking posts on the forums, mostly in the Chit Chat section i think, which all had a fishy link edited in a few days later. Reported a dozen or so over the last week alone and as far as i have seen, they got deleted by mods soon after. I have not found any in posts made before last summer, so i guess it started around June or July last year. So some of these posts were around here for several month without anyone noticing with 100 views and more on the topic.

Think these are AI generated as they are not your usual easy-to-spot spam posts but actual posts on DCS topics and read very natural. A lot of them even had several replies and likes, likely made before the spam link was edited to the text. All users were new users with just one or a few posts, so i do not think it was hacked accounts. But you can never be sure about.

Times getting rougher, so make a habit of not clicking on everything just because the context seems legit. Links can be just the URL (like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware) or embedded into text that might look like get a free full fidelity DCS module here. If you hover your mouse over the link, the tooltip will reveal the link address Be aware the text might even read an address that is different form where it is linked to If in doubt, do not click. You can report posts in the upper right corner of the post on the three dot menu, just let the mods know "suspicious link" in the report reason.

Guess @BIGNEWY and @NineLine are aware? Mentioning you just to make sure.

Here are some of the posts i reported, just so you know how clever they are made these days.

Fly safe folks!

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Edited February 1 by Schlingel mit Kringel
Separated the example posts as they were all close together and hard to read.

[BIGNEWY]

Hi, 

when you see them please continue to report them using the forum report next to each post and we will deal with them. 

Spammers are using AI now to make a post look like it is genuine, then they return and edit the post. 

So thank you for the post and reports, it helps keep the forum safe.

best regards

bignewy