Catfishing: Lure someone into a relationship by means of a
fictional online persona.Sockpuppet: A false
online identity, typically created by a person or group in order to promote
their own opinion or views.Some sockpuppets are easy to spot. They follow you to spy or
comment. When you look at them they have an empty blog. No posts, or only a
few. Sometimes you’ll get sockpuppets that have been generated and they have
almost identical uninteresting content. Many of these still have the original
tumblr icon. These are in general throw away identities.Second generation sockpuppets. A rebooted 2.0 version of
a known skeptic’s blog, this sockpuppet
has more credibility and back history. Not all version 2 blogs are sockpuppets,
but a lot of them are, and you’d be surprised by some of them. People will
treat these sockpuppets as friends, not realizing they’ve let their guard down
with someone who means them ill.Copying someone’s non-tumblr blog and making tumblr posts
out of it. This is a form of identity theft. If the blogger is neurodivergent
they might not be believed when they say those posts are not from them. Spot
this one by reverse image search to find the original blog that was copied.Fake skeptic sockpuppets. These are the hardest to spot. In
the case of Sophie and Gambles, they’ll re-post skeptic posts and only show
their colors in times of stress. These blogs have a pro-Sophie bent. They’ll
tell people not to post information detrimental to Sophie, to keep it a secret or
‘just between us’. They don’t want astrology posts about her nor release of
information such as the identity of NT guy. In Gambles’ case he defends
himself, deflecting blame to the innocent, attempting to gaslight or defending
his bad photoshop with worse fake science interpretations. You have to pay
attention to catch this; usually they just agree with the real skeptics. In addition, since we’ve
become sensitive to ‘voice’, they’ll take turns writing posts on some blogs to
conceal their presence.One trick these sockpuppets have been pulling is encouraging the overly
enthusiastic fans to pursue Benedict in real life. They may be giving advice or
encouragement on how to find him, while sabotaging the fan behind their back to
get them ‘caught’. Causing chaos is their goal.Some skeptics think that anyone who disagrees with them is
an enemy and whomever agrees with them is a friend. This is not true. Sometimes your worst enemy
is the person telling you what you want to hear and encouraging one in a self-damaging
action or set of beliefs.Another sockpuppet trick is to encourage others to turn
against the people whom Sophie hates. Think before reacting.Some sockpuppets have situated themselves so they are in the
center of the shared gossip. They know when the skeptics find something even
before we post it publicly. They work on influencing the undecided skeptics and
trying to covertly harass the pro-Benedict skeptics.Gambles posts photographs of women and say that it is him.
He lies with pictures. He loves fooling people into trusting him. Sometimes he
will ‘befriend’ someone using multiple sockpuppets, pretending to be a different
person each time. He likes stirring up skeptics against each other. Pretending
to be other people is how he amuses himself. He sends ‘asks’ he thinks will
change the narrative in a pro-Sophie direction. He messages people under other
names to try to sell his story.He’s basically boring and repetitive. The more people who
begin recognizing him playing his foolish games the better. Stay alert and stay
safe.Oh so interesting