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May 3 2024
Apparently someone, somewhere in the world, has built a bot that sends spam/fraud messages to posts around the world. In the few cases I've seen personally the user name was a bunch of random characters starting with a !, though I don't know that the presence of the ! is proof that it either is or is not spam.
The messages are pretty obviously spam, though they're made to appear to come from Freecycle instead of a Freecycle member. I'm not sure, but tyou may only see them if you have an outstanding Offer or Wanted. That's why I saw them.
Unfortunately, it's way too easy to implement this kind of thing if you have the right tools.
There's lots of traffic about this on the Freecycle moderator group emails. No information about a fix; it's only been happening for a few hours.
Unfortunately there's nothing I can do about it except report the sender when I notice them, but so far the offender had already been expunged. (Freecycle operates on multiple continents.)
All I can say at this point: If you get a suspicious message from a Freecycle user, ignore it. I hope a fix will come soon. Definitely do not click any links in the message!
Your C/U Moderator