Significant corruption of New Zealand-related profiles by novice users

I believe that a similar issue was reported here some months ago (maybe about June 2025), but I haven't been able to find the discussion using the community Search tool. I don't remember if that comment related specifically to New Zealand profiles. I have recently found many, many such profiles, and I would have liked to be able review the previous post to see more detail and, in particular, what action might have been taken by FS as a result. The post referred to numerous users, described as being "youth" and "African", who were making erroneous updates to profile data. As I cannot find the post, I am reporting what I have found here.

About three weeks ago, while looking at a completely unrelated discussion, I fortuitously found a technique that could provide me with a supply of profiles whose last names were blank. When I looked at these profiles and their change logs, I could see that their names (which were originally perfectly normal) had been mangled by various users to leave the last names blank. By clicking the users' ID, I could see that, in most cases, the users matched the description of "youth" and "African" (user name, photo, location). In a few cases, the user names were obscure, and sometimes the Chat option was not available for the user. Where it is available, the users' locations are one of several African countries. The updates started in maybe April or May 2025 and largely continued until August, although I did find one instance on the day that the change was made, some time this month (September).

As I looked at each of these profiles, I also reviewed the related profiles' names (the spouses, parents, children and siblings). I was looking for cases where the spouse's last name matched the profile's last name, the mother's last name matched the father's last name, or where the siblings or children's last names did not match their respective father's last name. This may sound a bit obsessive, but it provided a rich source of additional profiles whose names had also been mangled in a variety of different ways by the same users. Often several users had had a crack at updating the same profile name on different days. In one case, a profile name had been erroneously changed three times. On the first two occasions, the error was corrected within days by another independent user who happened to be following the profile and whose user name suggested that they might be related to the profile. On the third occasion, I corrected the name myself.

Over the last three weeks or so, I have corrected over 1100 profiles that I have found by using the technique that I described above. In each case, I checked the change log, filtered by Name. This is certainly only the tip of the iceberg, because:

1. I have only found profiles which were provided by the lists of "blank last name" cases or which are close relatives of such profiles. A profile with a blank last name would only appear on a list if it met certain criteria. (Those criteria were not explained by FS when they were raised here many months ago.)
2. The mangling of data is not restricted to the name vital. A cursory inspection of some change logs reveals that many other vital items have been changed, almost always for the worse. This includes places of death and burial and, unbelievably, sex.

I have deliberately not described how I found the "blank last name" profiles. This isn't because it's some sort of secret; I just think that this issue is serious enough as it is and it doesn't need any diversions.

With regard to what has triggered this avalanche of corrupting updates, I think that the users have been fed a stream of record hints relating to New Zealand obituaries and New Zealand cemetery transcriptions. This must surely have been part of some sort of organised campaign. The name change errors that have been made are not restricted to clearing out the last name. It would seem that the users have been attaching such records and whatever is provided in the record has been transferred holus bolus to the profile, for example, nicknames, married names, initials, etc. There are also instances where public profiles have been created for survivors mentioned in an obituary where there is no evidence that the survivors are deceased.