Random IMs — wtf?

August 20th, 2008 by Mike | Posted in blog, random |

I’ve been on AIM a long time. I mean, a long time. And this is probably the first time I’ve ever really been harassed on AIM by a bot-type service.

Up until about 3 days ago I hadn’t really ever been bothered too much on AIM by anyone… I mean, I have come across some weirdos, but starting about 3 days ago I’ve been getting random instant messages from screen names from people whose names end in “trout” and always ask a question or say something that should get you to respond (see picture for this post).

I have learned to not respond at this point but, it just so happens that I talked to one person for a small bit of time. She was very polite and used some random internet slang which had me convinced she wasn’t a bot. It turns out that on my end, her screen name appeared to be “weightytrout” and mine appeared to be “MortifiedTrout”… it was odd. Especially since the IM started like this:

weightytrout: You’re downright wonderful! I love you, I love you, I love you!
Me: ?
WeightyTrout: um…
Me: um
WeightyTrout: uuuumm, why would I die?
Me: what?
WeightyTrout: who is this?
Me: Mike
Me: who is this?

and the conversation continued and this person (it was a girl) ended up being kind of cool. Now, I don’t know how the hell someone could have gotten my AIM screen name since I don’t really give it out too much, but someone has it and is using it in a strange anonymous-based random-meeting type thing… I don’t know what to call it… I’m not sure if this whole *trout thing is supposed to be a way to get people to randomly meet or whatever but it’s getting damn annoying since I get 3-5 of these IMs a day. So long as I don’t respond, nothing happens, but yeesh…

What really surprises me about all of this is that in all of the years I’ve used AIM I’ve never had a problem with bots or anything like that (though there was one time I got some crazy AIM hacker virus when I was in 7th grade that spammed all of your buddies thus making a giant chain of death). I mean, MSN and Yahoo! chat are always prone to random pr0n-bot IMs but this surprised me, especially since AIM is usually pretty good about that stuff (as far as I know).

Let me know in the comments if you’ve gotten anything similar on your AIM account(s) and maybe we can figure this thing out… somehow…

–UPDATE–

I tweeted this post and a fellow Twitter user (@funkcoaster) pointed me to a wikipedia article explaining this fun little happening. It turns out (from what the user(s) who created this article think) that Facebook is to blame for this random “attack” on random screen names. Nothing malicious has come out of this (yet) so here’s to hoping AIM won’t kill us all.