Bogus People on Social Networking Sites
Posted: Sunday, November 08, 2009
by Joel Kontinen
http://joelkontinen.blogspot.com/
Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are good inventions. In a world that has become increasingly globalised, they are good ways of keeping in touch with people we know or once knew.
There are dangers lurking in the shadows, however. By this I mean people who pretend to be interested in you but their real interest is in your money.
As time went by, the man began to send more and more private messages to the woman. He said that he was deeply in love with her and wanted to marry her. So could she please send him money for the airfare to Europe so that they could meet each other face to face and plan their forthcoming marriage?
Still trusting her Facebook friend, she send him money. But it seems that the man kept on asking for more, providing excuse after excuse as to why he could not come just then. At some stage she became suspicious. Did the man really want to see her and marry her?
Then, to her dismay, she found out that the police were also interested in him. The man had become friends with several other ladies on Facebook. He had asked them to send him money so they could get married.
The police discovered that the photo on the man's profile page was someone else's.
This, and other similar stories should cause us to think twice. While the benefits of Facebook and other social networking sites certainly outnumber the disadvantages, we should not throw all caution to the winds. At times, healthy skepticism is needed.
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Top-level comments on this article: (5 total)Great article. Well done.I'm on both Twitter and Facebook. I understand that not everyone is who they say they are.However, the cases that you mention are cause by either people not being educated about the problems of social media, people being over-trusting or just plain gullible.Thanks. I agree. I admit that chose an extreme example.
With four daughters I am always wary of some of these social media sites. How-ever they have never had any problems. A big risk if you are a little lonely and therefore more hopeful!Thanks. While the problems are rare, they are nevertheless real.
If you start off with a solid and reliable list of Facebook friends, you can get a pretty good picture of the new "friends of friends" you start to accumulate. Quite a few of my "friends" are simply commercial organizations, and I'm just not that into Facebook. It seems kind of superficial.Thanks. As far as I know, all my FB friends are real but I'm not so sure about all Twitter followers, some are obviously Internet marketers who want to sell me their new product.
What a surprise that someone would lie on facebook. I had a nice lady tell me she wanted to buy a home. I took her word for it and spent a bit of time driving her around. She even convinced me to write an offer for a very expensive home. Well when it finally got to the point she claimed that she had won a big plie of money in a European lottery. I wasn't convinced. She kept asking me for money I didn't give her any. She flew to Spain and came back with an outlandish story. That's when I had enough. Some people just want to believe even when all the facts show different. She was nice but a fool.Thanks. I keep on getting lottery e-mails ("your e-mail address has won ... xxx million dollars/euros" etc.) every now and then, so I've become quite skeptical of everything that smacks of free money and other types of hoaxes as well.
First of all, people from Africa asking for money are never to be trusted as we have learned from various African Princes that I am sure everyone has had an e-mail from asking to hold money, etc.Secondly, never send money to anyone over the internet unless its secure and you are actually purchasing goods. For instance, want to fly your newly found man over to the states? BUY him the ticket. Manage where your money goes, keep in control. Sending cash to random bank accounts overseas is bound to get you robbed.This is silliness. I thought this article was going to be about fake twitter accounts in the sense of spam bots, etc.; Which I think are generally more problematic. This method preys on peoples weakness and emotions instead so it is good to hear about it.However, I have seen a lot of this going on, but in a more malicious way. People going overseas and logging into a random computer with their e-mail and having their info stolen and then someone acting as if they are them asking for more and more information from various friends found through the e-mail.BE CAREFUL OVERSEAS WHEN LOGGING IN TO YOUR MAIL. The computers there are not all as clean as you may seem.All it takes is a simple key logging program running in the background invisible (even to ctrl+alt +del).Thanks. You raise a number of good points that add to what I wrote above. There are indeed all kinds of dangers lurking along the info highway that we should not ignore.
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