Spamtastic T-shirt sales

Some spam operations are highly sophisticated and clearly involve significant effort on the part of their operators, but not this one

nothing to see here, just two posts with the exact same text

In a fascinating coincidence that isn’t a coincidence at all, Bluesky users “Haven Tallmadge” and “Yara Rochelle” both allegedly just saw the same T-shirts hit the clearance section, and made identical posts promoting the shirts in question. In reality, the T-shirts are being sold via a website rather than physical stores, and whoever made the posts in question is highly unlikely to have encountered them in any sort of clearance section. There are some additional anomalies: the accounts that made the identical posts are new and have posted no other content of their own, and their T-shirt posts have been amplified by numerous new accounts with duplicate profile images.

all of the accounts were created between January 14th and 16th, 2026

The two accounts that posted the duplicate T-shirt advertisements, along with at least 29 of the accounts amplifying them, are part of a spam network consisting of at least 31 Bluesky accounts created between January 14th and January 16th, 2026. All 31 accounts use traditionally female English-language names and have a first name/last name pair as their display name. Based on the number of accounts each follows, the spam accounts appear to be following other Bluesky users in batches of 500. None of the accounts in the network are hosted on Bluesky’s own personal data servers or utilize the associated bsky(dot)social domain; all 31 accounts use myatproto(dot)social instead.

most of the spam accounts follow the largely empty “Anna Guns” account

Overall, the accounts in the spam network primarily follow random liberal and left-wing Bluesky accounts, some of which they also amplify periodically. The account followed by the largest share of the spam network, however, is @annaguns.bsky.social (“Anna Guns”), an account with a default profile image and a distinct lack of authentic followers. The “Anna Guns” account’s sole post to date is a reply advertising the same T-shirt site promoted by the spam network.

why use a different photo for each account when you can use the same two photos over and over?

With the exception of the two accounts that posted the original T-shirt advertisements, every single account in the network uses one of two photographs as a profile image. The photographs are sometimes cropped differently from account to account; for example, the image used by “Elaine Walton” is a zoomed version of the same image used by “Brenda Waldron”. It is unclear why the operators of this network chose to use images of the same two people over and over rather than employing a wider variety of photographs, as the latter approach would have made the accounts less obviously inauthentic.

unsurprisingly, the photos are plagiarized

As is often the case with spam networks that utilize the same images again and again, the profile photos used by this spam network are plagiarized. The two photographs repeatedly used by the spam accounts have also appeared on multiple X accounts, according to Google image search results. The repeated use of the same photos by the Bluesky network is on its own sufficient evidence of astroturfing, and the presence of the same images on other platforms further corroborates the inauthenticity of the accounts and the network to which they belong.