I have a new friend — or do I? After I logged into Facebook, I was presented with a rather nice looking female who found me and wants to be friends. Oh, joy!
“O RLY?”
“Jennifer Weissman”, as she’s named, is located in Florida, works for Countrywide Home Loans (with a corresponding affiliate hyperlink), and joined on December 11th. Let’s not forget, she’s single and is seeking a date or a long-term relationship, too.
“Fail.”
I’ve written a lot about social media frustrations and you will see that spam is my biggest pet peeve. This is mainly because I have doubts that the big three (MySpace, Facebook, AOL) do enough to aggressively go after spammers and preserve the integrity of their social networks.Of course, I really can’t complain unless I report the offender. Here’s how to report spam profiles on Facebook:
“Pwnt.”
Have you observed more frequent unknown/unsolicited friend requests on Facebook?
Share your experiences in the comments below!
{ 25 comments }
She was fat anyway.
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
Ahhh, so now that you no longer work for a liberal media company the Junkman’s posts are no longer blocked
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
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_networking_websites
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
this doesnt help a bit if you get a friend request, accept it, and THEN determine its spam. I can locate no way to report a fake profile once its accepted, and yet you cant really always tell if they are fake til you accept it….then all you can do is unfriend them and unless they send another request they go their merry way to spam others.
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
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.
what if shes mexican? WHAT IF HER LIFE DEpENDS ON U CLICKING THAT LINK?!?!?!?!? WHAT THEN?!?!?
I get a lot of crap friend requests from “hot babes” who have no mutual friends and the only thing it says on their profile is check out my hawt nekkid photos at unratedprofiles.com/blah blah blah and something retarded/ditzy like i'm buying a new pink bra today! Tee hEe!
I get a lot of crap friend requests from “hot babes” who have no mutual friends and the only thing it says on their profile is check out my hawt nekkid photos at unratedprofiles.com/blah blah blah and something retarded/ditzy like i'm buying a new pink bra today! Tee hEe!
Here's a question. I get a friend request on FaceBook that seems like spam, but it actually lists a few mutual friends. The mutual friends are NOT from the same social circles – I'm pretty sure they don't know each other. Also, when I check the profile of one of the “mutual friends”, the spam profile is NOT listed as a friend of theirs.
How can a spam friend request include a mutual friend, if the mutual friend is not ACTUALLY friends with the spam profile?
I did not share a link but there are a lot of posts saying I shared a link. http://www.funniestvideoonthenet.co and http://www.dietnewsdaily.co.tv. I did not send these to anyone yet there are posts saying I shared the link with lots of friends. I went into links – my links and there is nothing there to delete. They do not appear on my wall. If I open my profile then wall they are not there for me to remove. They are in the news feed/most recent posts. I do not get the remove option if I hover to the right of the post nor do I get the hide. How can I get these removed? None of my friends sent the link to me and I did not send it to them. I would like them removed.
Pam, I, too, have been inundated with these postings from me to all my friends that I didn't authorize. I have no idea how to stop it from happening. I went to both sites and of course got no where.
What I did was go to each friends page individually and deleted “my” posting and that takes it off my page as well AND I suspended my facebook account for now, citing this problem as the reason.
I've just sent an e mail to julia@news6health.com, no reply yet, but that's the only contact that I've been able to find that might have a clue as to how to stop this. I'm sure you're as aggravated as I am!
Let's hope for a resolution soon!
what if they message you but do not send you a friend request? I got a long message from someone asking me to be their “nanny” and it's very much suspicious (read: total B.S.). I'm taking it seriously because it looks a lot like the kind of scheme used to lure victims into sex slavery and there is a major problem here (in Mozambique/South Africa) with human-trafficking. I would like to report this fake profile, how can I do it in a way that will actually result in admins removing the page or (preferably) reporting it to higher authorities?
thanks.
I suppose human trafficking is enough cause for Facebook to review it and forward the details to NCMEC. If you report the profile, there's an option to describe what you suspect is happening and flag it for review. As far as guaranteeing it gets taken down, that's not something you or I will know. The best thing to do is to report it and let Facebook take the necessary action to address it.
It could be that you allowed an unscrupulous app to have access to post (or send messages) to friends and you don't know about it. To fix this, go to the ACCOUNT menu (top right corner), then click APPLICATION SETTINGS. From there, you can edit the permissions on certain apps or even remove their access entirely. Even if you remove an app, you can always permit it again, so there's no harm done.
Hope that helps.
Based on the info you provided, it means the alleged spammer has permissions to permit their friend list being shared. Your other friends might have opted to not share their friend list. If it's not that, it's a quirk in how Facebook might determine “queued” friend requests and might be showing you that on the alleged spammer's account.
Best course of action is not to approve or ask one of your friends if they know that person. Otherwise, place them into a highly-restricted friend list that shows minimal information about you and limits their ability to post things on your wall until they are worthy of being one of your friends.
Yup, there's a lot of spammers out there that target their victims because they know they'll click.
No one's life should depend on you clicking a link. Most messages of this sort are scams and should be reported to Facebook.
haha, I never blocked your posts. I switched to a new commenting system, Disqus a while ago and fine-tuned the spam filter. You should be good to go.
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