Brutkey

Fabio Manganiello
@fabio@manganiello.social

@JigmeDatse@social.openpsychology.net @mutualaid@a.gup.pe @aral@mastodon.ar.al @davidculley@hachyderm.io @Aseelsehwel@mas.to @NouranKhaledGh@mastodon.social to be clear, I never said that I ran formal KYC around these accounts. That would involve access to bank accounts or IDs, run them through WorldCheck, Onfido etc., and given the situation this is just not doable (at least not by private citizens, and not in a situation of extreme war like this where a lot of this information may either be hard to get by or very insensitive to ask).

It should be the job of the platforms that run these fundraisers to run them though, and I can tell you that the fact that they don't often do it properly isn't that surprising.

We can never be 100% sure without running those checks, but we can be reasonably confident by investigating through other ways (EXIF headers of direct shared media, videocalls, reverse image/video search, IP addresses left on our systems if they click on the links we provide them...).

Plus, we're talking of someone in this case who posted videos from that terrace:

1. Showing her phone with her Mastodon account opened to prove that she's the same person
2. Showing herself standing there and talking into the camera

And she's also open to have a videocall to confirm that it's her.

Of course 100% trust doesn't exist when it comes to someone who you've never met offline, but we're close enough to the "extremely unlikely to falsify" case here IMHO.

Other scam accounts that I investigated repeatedly refused to have their identity checked, which is exactly the opposite of what I'm seeing here.

About the "mass follow" - what would you expect from people who are literally dying from starvation who come to a platform that they don't even know how it works and ask for help? Of course they want to maximize reach. I can't see that by itself as a sign of scam.

Eventually think by yourself "which signals would I like to see to trust these people?", knowing that probably you won't have the means of running a proper KYC, and that any level of confidence will necessarily be probabilistic - but weigh that confidence against the risk of not giving aid to people who are literally dying in a genocide if your hypothesis is wrong.

I think it's a quite thorny issue, but we can probably all (as Fediverse) come up with a set of best practices to judge these cases.

The biggest issue I see here is that, when someone cries "scam!" publicly without running even basic checks first, just on the basis of their instinct, they may end up doing a REALLY big damage. Because others who were willing to help will probably also become suspicious. And if the accounts are actually genuine that really makes the difference between life and death.