I get Facebook friend requests, sometimes from people I have absolutely no connection to, sometimes from people who are friends with someone I know (but it turns out later they accepted a friend request from someone they had absolutely no connection to and that’s how this person is “connected” to my actual FB friend).
So in the latter case I’ve occasionally ended up accepting the friend request, and here’s what goes down:
Them: Hi
Me: Hey, TheirName. Remind me where you know me from? Are we in the same FB group and you liked something I posted, or should I know you personally?
Them: What’s up?
Them: Hi how are you?
Me: What’s the purpose the msg? Are you inspired by something I posted that you read?
Them: I only want to be friends
Me: So, OK, tell me about yourself, your interests and hobbies, the things you’re passionate about. What constitutes a good online friendship as far as you’re concerned?
Them: How’s your day going?
Them: Can we chat more on WhatsApp? Or Instagram? Hangout?
Me: Umm, no thanks
Them: OK
Them: Hey there
Obviously they’re up to something and it has to do with diverting people into chatting in some other space like the platforms mentioned above. (That’s a common request, and one of the few things that diverges from meaningless “hi how are you” stuff). Why? What can they do there that they can’t do in Facebook chat? And how does the scam go down? Are they selling porn? Trying to become my mail-order bride? Getting me to invest with their good friend who has a great opportunity? How does this tend to work? And why don’t they try stringing their marks along with some actual conversation instead of being annoying as fuck with the empty repetitive “hey how’s it going” bullshit? Are they waiting for ME to initiate some kind of transaction, like make a pass at them or something?
This is a WAG, but I’m guessing you are chatting to a bot, and you don’t talk to a real person until you go into a chatroom, or What’sApp. Then, yeah, they probably pitch something to you. It probably violates a Facebook policy to do so, which is why the bot has to get you into some other place.
I’m not sure how this works, yet, but I’ll bet it’s not going to be something you want to respond to. I get “friend” requests all the time, not necessarily from Facebook. I think it’s a shotgun approach – blast something random and see what suckers you can hit, and work from there.
I’ve received a few over the years. If you look at their profile it’s practically empty and they JUST joined. The look is androgynous (trans? not sure) and have a provocative profile pic. And there are no “mutual friends” that might make you think Facebook is trying to get your old high school clique back together. I file it with those scams that tell you there’s money tied up in Nigeria and if you just send a few thousand dollars…crazy, yeah, but if it never worked they wouldn’t keep doing it.
I’ve been getting a lot of friend requests on Facebook from young ladies (going by the profile pictures) whose mammalian credentials are in no doubt. I think I have an idea what the scam there might be.
I get those now and then. I’ve never tried to respond to one. I just mark them as spam.
I got a different kind last month. An older cousin of mine who I probably haven’t seen for more 20 years sent me a friend request. But I was wondering what was going on because I was already friends with him (although he never posts anything). I accepted the request because I thought maybe somehow he had gotten disconnected.
But it was an impersonator who had copied his profile picture. He had almost no friends listed, and no mutual ones (I have lots of relatives who are mutual friends of me and my cousin). More obvious, he listed his birth date as 1975 when my cousin was born around 1930.
He sent me a message asking me how things were going (which my cousin never has). I responded because I was curious what the scam was. He said he had just heard of some great investment scheme by which he had made $200,000.:smack:
I asked him to send me the information through his original profile instead of the new one, and he stopped responding. After that I reported him to Facebook as an impersonator and they immediately wiped the profile.
I’ve only accepted friend requests from strangers who seem legitimately to have parallel interests on FB (i.e. belong to the same groups and post related material). There typically are no messages from them after that. I don’t “follow” them so I have no idea what they’re up to in Michigan, Ukraine, Morocco or wherever. Apparently there are people who just like accumulating a lot of Facebook friends.
There’ve been a few of those too*. When I don’t respond within a few days the requests evaporate.
This has been a common tactic for a while, at least 5 years. If there’s ever a doubt, check with the existing account but the presence of two of them pretty much assures that the new one is a copycat.
They are looking for people who don’t ask those questions. They want dumb assess who accept any friend request and just install apps and click links. If you get a friend request, look at the profile first. Do you personally know that person? Is there any way that person would know you? Is there any overlap in interest between the two of you? If no, then don’t accept the friend request. There are 100s of scams that can be run on dumb people who don’t think before they click or accept.
Note that Facebook’s algorithms on ads, news, etc. take into consideration who your “friends” are and what those “friends” are interested in.
So if you become “friends” with a Russian bot, expect to see a ton of nut job, weird political stuff. The Russians are spending an immense amount of money to influence Westerners politically. This is one part of the strategy.
(And note how well it works, as your friends foolishly accept these requests.)
There is a ton of gaming the system going on and FB is making a tiny, token, effort to stop it.
I have a couple like that. One of them had a lot of mutual friends of mine who were part of the local Balkan music community, so I accepted. Mostly she uses her account to market her DJ gigs at local clubs. Benign enough, I guess. She has never contacted me directly.
To what extent does opting to NOT have targeted ads (it’s a Facebook setting) make any difference? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if FB still targets ads in violation of their own statement to the contrary. OTOH, the ads that I do see don’t tend to be relevant to me, so maybe it’s working. Or maybe they just aren’t very good at it :dubious:
ETA: Yeah, I see your point about the usefulness of the strategy for seeding the minds of those for whom it would work as described
I did have a person purporting to be a naval officer stationed in the pac fleet. he had 8 or 9 pics, including some candid at a boat party sort of pic, generally like a real person would have. we got into a chat in facebook not on a different chat function and we had a reasonable conversation for about 20 or so exchanges, then I started sort of delicately asking questions that have reasonable unusually oriented answers [ways of phrasing or commenting that are particularly specific to navy and military life] and it was fairly obvious that the person was neither US or any other military. I finally told them outright that they were not who they claimed to be, and that it was offensive that they would try faking people out by pretending to be a US officer. He ditched his account and vanished.
Hey, I was 99 percent sure he was fishing for something, and was bored and figured I would amuse myself. There would be absolutely no reason in the world for a pac surface officer to be interested in an atlantic sub fleet retired dependent =)
" The Russians are spending an immense amount of money to influence Westerners politically." Curious as to what you mean when you say “Russians”. Do you mean that some individuals directly connected to the Kremlin are doing this or some teenage hackers in St. Petersburg? And when you say, “immense amount of money”, do you mean $100,000’s, $Millions? And finally you say they want to “influence Westerners politically”. Do you mean they want to promote pro Kremlin ideas? I hear that they want to promote “disharmony” and “disrupt” the political processes in the US. How exactly could they accomplish this? Buying Facebook ads that no one pays attention to, let alone are influenced by?
Russia, as in the government. Amounts in the billions of US dollars.
And the ads and fake accounts work. Really, really well.
Take Brexit. An immense amount of false information flooded the country. So many people were duped by it they voted for it. Now that the know more about it, the polls show it is no longer favored. But no one wants to scrap the vote and try it again.
Splitting up the EU is a major goal of Russia. Ditto NATO. So they also support politicians that are anti-NATO.
It is remarkable you don’t know all of this already.
Please don’t tell us that these are “common knowledge”.
“Take Brexit. An immense amount of false information flooded the country.” Actually, an immense amount of information flooded the country from BOTH sides and the people voted as they saw fit. Tell us, exactly, how they were some how tricked into voting for BREXIT? Sounds like you want to keep setting new votes on BREXIT until you get the vote YOU are satisfied with. Who ever heard of taking another vote. Tell us all exactly why the original vote shouldn’t count? Russian interference? That’s a good one!
“Splitting up the EU is a major goal of Russia. Ditto NATO. So they also support politicians that are anti-NATO.” Of course this is true. But why do you assume that the leaders and people of the West countries are so stupid as to not realize this and take action to prevent it from happening? And you are the only person to know that some of Russia’s goals are to dismantle the EU and NATO?
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