Facebook Spam: You’ve Got to Be Kidding, Right?

I get these bogus friend requests now and then. I always check the profiles of these mystery women (the requests are always female), and every one of them has a virtually blank profile. No indication that they are real profiles let alone someone that I've ever met. The only information the profiles ever provide is that they are looking for relationships and are not in any of my networks.

I get the feeling that this is one of those phenomenon that won't go away easily. I'm sure reporting does little, though I always do. But like spam email, it just never ends

I got a Friend request from a woman with only 1 profile picture, no profile, and NO female friends??? Clearly the "hot chick " pictured, tempted these men to accept her request. I also never got an email indicating her request like all other friend requests. It just showed up on my facebook page.

@Willmarth:
Good observations. I've been seeing more of these spam requests recently, but I didn't realize until you pointed it out that I don't receive an email notifying me of the request; it just appears on my profile. This tells me that these requests are somehow identified as being different than legitimate requests, so there must be a way to easily flag them as spam before they are even generated.

Happi Slappi,

Thanks for commenting. While I do respect your desire to reference Wikipedia, understand that the AOL Buddy List *was* the first social network of its kind. It was the first network that people used to engage and add friends with each other, and further -- communicate and grow those relationships.

I am pretty confident in saying that AOL is around the top three (or four) networks, because of their AIM users. If I remember, 65M users supersedes Yahoo's and Microsoft's IM network.

Also, if you recall *wayyy* back in the day, circa AOL 4.0, AOL had a very easy to use online profile product and became very popular during the adolescent years of AOL. Recently, MySpace merely created their product from AOL's (and I don't blame them, either).

Now, getting back to the point of this entry, ALL social networks need to be aware of the Spam that exists on them and they should educate users to assist in reporting it properly, like I demonstrated for the Facebook Spam.

Thanks again for the comment!

~Joe

Um yeah. AOL isn't in the top three social networks. It's Myspace, Orkut, and Facebook.

It's not even listed on this list of social networking sites.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_net...

JW,

LOL, you know I've been called a flaming liberal, a cold neo-nazi, Marxist Communist among other things... so I am again going to rest with, "I hate everyone equally"

Anyhow, the new spam filter is working out pretty well. Their algorithm catches more spam and lets more ham get posted. We'll see how it behaves over the next week when I roll down to AZ this week.

~J

Ahhh, so now that you no longer work for a liberal media company the Junkman's posts are no longer blocked ;)

JW,

Though I don't disagree with your conclusion, I think spammers are trying to make their junk profiles seem more approachable to the male 18 - 30 demographic.

On an unrelated note, I did switch to a new spam filter on here, you might enjoy it and not get blocked. It beats Akismet.

~Joe

She was fat anyway.