I’m a member of a few different Slack channels – they’re great for collaboration, helping others out and asking for assistance when you get stuck on something.

The biggest one is Windows Admins; winadmins.slack.com with over 1700 members (highly recommended if you’re a Windows Administrator).

An interesting event occured today, where an account called ‘jb’ joined, and immediately posted this:

Rather spammy in itself from where I sit, and a few others piped up being unimpressed with this action. ‘jb’ apologised and removed the post.

Doing this in a sysadmin channel however, is asking for a bit of further investigation. Putting aside the name itself (which along with the logo, looks like it should be a product for a completely different industry), it was a bit weird that ‘jb’ appeared to be doing marketing, but had also signed up with an email address which was admin@theirdomain – not something that a marketer would have access to.

I’ve censored the image as I don’t have permission to use it, and it’s not about them at all – but for context, it was a black and white face shot of a young, white female, with their title as ‘designer and inventor’

A reverse google image search on the profile picture used revealed this:

…which turns out to be photos of people at a clothing launch in Berlin, and ‘jb’s’ photo was a cropped version of that. Now, it could be that this fashion industry person in Berlin is also the the person that runs this Japanese based tech company’s PR, AND has access to the admin email account for their domain.

Asking this mystery person what was going on was just met with silence, and then the account became inactive. What happened?? We may never know.

There’s a few take away points from all from this:

1. Don’t steal a photo from the internet to use as your marketing tool, reverse Google images is good enough to find even part of a photo if it’s indexed.
2. Don’t go into a sysadmin channel and spam your product; it won’t end with a positive experience from the people who generally have to stop spam.
3. Slack communities should be treated as open available information – if an account gets approval, they could be scraping the conversations (and using for legitimate business purposes too)
4. Don’t be fake when peddling your wares; people see through it.
5. Spellcheck your automated messages; morarale isn’t a word.

Again, I don’t know how much of this applies to the company in question, draw your own conclusions. Maybe it was an elaborate test to see how the mood changed in the Slack channel?