Over the past few weeks my sister-in-law has been going crazy over this assumed psycho on AIM. She’s forwarded me many messages, and we’ve laughed at how utterly crazy the person on the other end seems to be.
I mean lately she can’t jump on AIM for 2 seconds to ask me simple questions without one of these messages popping up. Yesterday I was trying to help her buy memory for her pc, but every couple messages she’d have to stop and deal with something “Coho” messaging her again. She’d block the name and another would pop up. It’s gotten to a point where it was seriously annoying, so today I started doing a little research.
What struck me as odd was the fact that the other person always IM’d my sis-in-law first, but the person then tried to claim my sis-in-law was doing the contacting. It’s been a never ending battle of Who the hell are you? I don’t know, you contacted me first! No, you IM’d me!
Today’s conversation was a repeat of these weird convos. Of course I’ve blocked out my sis-in-law’s screen name for privacy reasons.
The thing that tipped me off to a possible bot was the fact that “StapledCoho” mentioned multiple accounts and blocking them. My sis-in-law’s boyfriend tried IM’ing the name back with random quotes, and he also received a message about blocking numerous ‘Coho accounts.
A quick Google search sent me to this post about Coho Aim Spam. It appears that this is a bot called The Great Hatsby (yes a word play featuring The Great Gatsby) setup as a project to connect two random people on aim to initiate a conversation. Originally the bot was pulling screen names from the list of most recent LiveJournal posts, but then people stopped reporting seeing the bot from 2007 until recently. It has also been reported that Xanga and deviantART users are also being contacted.
Lately these messages have been popping up for my sis-in-law every other day, but she has never had a LiveJournal account. After reading through the wiki page I discovered that recently the bot has become active again, and it’s pulling recent public Twitter messages, and sending messages. In the case of my sis-in-law, her Aim and Twitter names are the same, so she’s receiving the messages.
When one user responds to the message sent by the bot, the message will show to the first user as the original message initiating the conversation instead of showing the message that was originally sent by the bot. Therefore both users think the other initiated the conversation. Also screen names are replaced, so when user A sends a message back through the bot, user B sees the bot’s name instead of user A’s screen name. It can be very frustrating if you have tons of these conversations popping up randomly, and people are getting ill because they think they have crazies contacting them!
There is a simple solution though. Even though I think it should be required to “Opt In” to the project, it’s not, but you can “Opt Out” with a simple code. When any screen name ending in ‘Coho messages you just reply with the Opt Out code “$optout”. The opt out code also works for the “Salmon” and “Trout” versions of the bot as well.
If you do however think this is a project that would be fun to participate in, you can choose to opt in to the “Salmon” version of the bot via the Project Upstream website.
