Not sure how many people were around four years ago for the original drama, but @storyofrachel@hexbear.net was a banned user from early on the site’s history, and I’ve seen quite a bit of speculation recently that a current frequent poster in c/mutualaid is an alt of hers due to having a similar MO and personal details (such as them both living in the same city)
For context, u/storyofrachel was an unhoused trans woman, who frequently solicited money from the community and had problems with substance abuse. She eventually made a post bragging about scamming money from users here (I myself was one of the users who sent her money) and blowing it on drugs (with a picture of the drugs in question) and a
bunch of homophobic slurs (TW: homophobia, self harm).
She later claimed that her account had been hacked, which frankly I did and do not believe. She was unbanned but later banned for other shit which I don’t recall and am unable to reconstruct from the modlog and came back on a bunch of different alts, all of which were banned.
If there’s any truth to this, it is deeply fucked that this person is still here, evading her ban and scamming people four years later. As one of the people who was taken advantage of previously (and, possibly, again with this current user!), people should at least be able to make an informed decision with all available context. If we want this community to function, and I say this as someone who has sent hundreds of dollars to people over the years through this community, we should be able to guard against bad actors who are trying to take advantage of the compassion and generosity of our user base.
Edit: There’s an Instagram with both usernames on it, publicly available. It’s 100% the same person. Not going to post it because I don’t want anyone to get doxxed but yeah.
Edit edit: I’m going to go touch grass now. Anyone who is being willfully obtuse about why I made this post can read it again or any of my other comments in this thread
Does Hexbear log IP addresses of login attempts? Is there any definitive way to tell if they’re the same people?
It wouldn’t be a magic bullet, but it’s a data point. Correlators need a lot of data and IPs are an important step. Two accounts with similar behavior, similar names and similar locations are more likely to be the same person than two accounts with similar behavior and similar names.
Is it really worth collecting identifiable data on all of us just to “catch out” banned users who came back? In this case it is widely known they are the same person, and there is evidence, but it is against the rules to post it, for good reason IMO.
In this case specifically, IPs would not have helped much considering the user left for an extended period of time, and was almost certainly on a mobile internet connection the vast majority of the time which wouldn’t be consistent at all, nor necessarily even map to a geographical region reliably.
