One in five willing to make Facebook friends with Complete Strangers

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...-facebook-friends-with-complete-strangers.ars

 

Stupid user syndrome strikes again *sigh* For once, you can't blame Facebook.

 

Rejection of friend requests on FB is generally considered rude, so it doesn't surprise me that people were willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the "fake" friend. Also, the number of friends a person has is often correlated with his or her perceived social status (particularly among the younger generation) - which also contributes to the reluctance to reject friend requests from strangers.

 

Let's not enable stupidity by giving them excuses, eh? As far as "friend collecting"..it's called compensating.

 

LOL kinda reminds me of a friend request I got with a message attached, I was like hmn? seems to familiar like some of the yahoo scam mails I have got in the past, and all she or he? had was like 20 old dudes on her friends list, you can see the message I sent back in the screen capture. seems she either changed her profile or facebook deleted her, who knows? I think by reading the way she talks that she is either from Africa, or the Philippians who knows?

 

Nothing new here, do you really think all those young d00ds with over 1k friends on Facebook really know all of them?
It's impossiblee

 

Exactly, because, as stated above:

I'd like to see the stats for those FB members having e.g. over 500 friends, how many of them do they really know, and regularly communicate with. I'd suggest the percentage would be very low.
These days there's a proliferation of self-seeing, celebrity status seeking, regardless of talent or capability, in my opinion.

 

You would not believe just how pathetic some of these users are. I personally know one individual who "met" some girl who went by the name "Yvonne", then fell for a bunch of bull similar to what Warlockz posted. Over a years time, he sent her several thousand dollars and repeatedly fell for every lame excuse for why she hasn't come to meet him and take him with her, everything from being in the hospital to being mugged to being stranded in London and then Nigeria (there on business??). He refused to hear that he was being scammed. I'm pretty sure that she even had him laundering money for them at one point. He was convinced it was a legit job!! After they'd moved their "teenage dribble" (he's in his late 30s!) chat to Yahoo, I tried to track this girls location. It led to a California proxy. It took a full year for it to sink in what was happening and stop sending her money. It would be bad enough if that was the end of the story except that he's doing it again with another girl who calls herself Christy, who he "met" thru Yvonne. He's sending her $500 so she can get a place for them, then she's coming to get him, so he says. I don't know what to do with him. There's no telling him anything. He won't hear it. You can't educate someone who's thinking with their hormones and not their head.

These people prey on those with low self esteem and/or intelligence. Short of completely restructuring Facebook chat to make this impossible, I don't see any way to stop this.

 

How so? If you hide or delete a friend request, the sender won't know. There is no notification sent to the sender.

 

This sort of thing has been going on for years, well before Facebook was around.

 

One of these days, he needs to be aware that either LEA will be at his door or someone he really doesn't want at his door. There are all sorts of possibilities here besides just an everyday scam. You're right, as long as he's willing to be a part of it, and until Facebook, actually, changes a lot more than just chat, there's little you can do.

 

They should have friend requests filtered the way spam is filtered. That's how email servers dealt with the problem.

 

You can't filter stupidity

 

Maybe if such guys can see these scams for what they are : -http://www.internet-love-scams.org/-

noone_particular :

 

Well you can limit who can send you a friend request down to Friends of Friends. You do not have to accept a Friend Request, you can delete it or hide it.