This is a bit of a rant I wanted to post somewhere after I found my name used for something I didn’t do. Perhaps you can give some insight on what happened here, because I am really confused.
A little bit of context: for the longest time, I used “Cornflakes3007” as my online name everywhere. These days I find the name a little cringe, but it was (and partially still is) a pretty big part of my online presence.
Yesterday, I thought I’d google the name and see what shows up. Most of the results link to my Youtube channel and its videos, but one thing was this:
It’s a document uploaded to Scribd, a PDF hosting site. I was aware of the site’s existence, but never actively used it before.
The document itself is just one page, it’s a screenshot of the Products section on Enlighten’s website, taken in 2022. Title and description were written by AI, but apparently the original non-AI title was “CITY ENLIGHTEN” with “Ii i i i i” as the description.
Here’s where it gets weird. The PDF was uploaded by…
Hold up? That’s me right there, except that it isn’t. Now, I’d believe some bot scraped a random name for this upload and somehow landed on mine, but there’s more to it. Everything on the page does make sense in a way - it’s all (somewhat) related. Here’s what I mean:
-
The name obviously, but I don’t know where it pulled the “bricks” from. My online presence has always been mostly about bricks, but I never called myself that - it was always “Cornflakes3007” without any additions.
-
I did use that profile picture at one point, but I haven’t used it anywhere since late 2020, if not earlier. Where did it find that?!
-
My relation to what’s on the document. I was (and still am) a pretty big fan of Enlighten, and I actually used that City picture as my wallpaper at one point (though that was only ever locally on my tablet, not online). I think I also had the skating clown as my profile picture on Youtube for a while. This would’ve all been around 2021-2022, so right when the screenshot was taken.
Now, how did this bot / human (?) / entity make the connection between all these things? The document was probably uploaded in 2022 (Scribd unfortunately doesn’t show an upload date). Where did it pull my horrible old profile pic, unused for two years at that time? What’s the point of this document to begin with?
Scribd does have a feature to report documents, but you need to sign up in order to use it. I haven’t done that yet, it doesn’t bother me that much. I’m just really confused by it.
Do you have any idea what could be behind all this?
). Just the happenstance of someone who likely owns several hundred bot accounts all farming different sites in the hopes that one of them actually makes money.
