Bill's Bible Basics Blog

https://www.billkochman.com/Blog/before-you-click-on-confirm-or-accept/

Are you aware of the fact that you may unknowingly be allowing scammers, porn stars and other questionable riffraff to join your circle of Facebook friends? I didn’t think so. Well, believe it or not, but that is EXACTLY what you may be doing when you don’t take the time to vet and carefully examine each of your new friend requests under your “Friend Requests” menu.

In other words, if you just automatically click on the “Confirm” button next to each name under your “Friend Requests” menu because you are eager to have new friends, or perhaps because you want to have a longer friends list in order to impress your buddies, you could be letting shady characters into your social circle without realizing it. How do you know, unless you slow down, and take the time to go to each person’s timeline, in order to determine who they are, what they are about, what they believe, what their interests are, etc.?

Personally, I would NEVER accept a friend request without doing this first; because failure to vet potential friends is asking for trouble. As you will see in a moment, your failure to check out potential new friends could even negatively affect your already-established friends.

If you take this extra step with each friend request, you may be shocked and surprised to discover that some timelines are nothing more than traps to entice unwary victims to visit a porn-related website or page.

Look; if you get a friend request and their profile pic under your “Friend Requests” menu is a very sexy-looking girl, watch out! It is quite possible that it is a bogus Facebook account. So, don’t be surprised if when you visit their timeline, you discover a string of very suggestive, sexy images, with an invitation that says something like “See my nude photos here”. The word “here” will actually be a link to some other page not on Facebook, where said person will bare the goods, if you know what I mean.

Trust me; over the ten+ years that I have been a part of Facebook, I have come across many bogus Facebook accounts like this, and I still do. The best thing that you can do in such a case is to simply click on the “Ignore” button — or “Delete Request” button — on their page. Please note that I said ON THEIR PAGE. As I said before, you need to go to their page in order to determine what kind of person you are dealing with.

Of course, you could block such mischief makers too. However, personally, I view doing this as an exercise in futility, because the account is bogus, and will probably be reported by a lot of other Facebook users as well. If that happens, Facebook will take down the page sooner or later anyway. So in the end, you will just end up with a long list of blocked users who don’t even exist anymore.

As I said, more than likely, if you have received a friend request from one of these porn scammers, many other Facebook users have as well, and some of them have probably already reported the page. So, you might not even want to bother with reporting the page. In fact, if you report too many pages too often, Facebook may possibly begin to view you as an annoyance. So reporting a bogus account may not always work in your favor. Again, I counsel you to just hit the “Ignore” button, or the “Delete Request” button, and forget about it. That scammer probably already has dozens of other bogus Facebook accounts anyway.

Sadly, it doesn’t quite end there. If in your haste you allow these scammers onto your friends list because you failed to check them out first, you may be doing even more harm. Let me explain to you why this is so.

Stop and think about this. If you accept their friend request, you are legitimizing them as a real person. Now, imagine if twenty people on your friends list do the same thing. That means that the scammer will now have twenty people on their friends list who know each other. Not only that, but those twenty people have confirmed that the scammer is a real person, and someone who can be trusted. In other words, they have given the scammer credibility. That scammer can then send out even more friend requests to other of your friends.

Now, here is where the damage occurs. If those people make the same mistake as you initially did, they may look under their “Friend Requests” menu, see that they have twenty mutual friends with this person, and then decide “Oh, okay. My twenty friends accepted them as a friend, so this person must be alright.”

In short, your friends will do the exact same thing that you did. They will not take the time to investigate that person before clicking on the “Confirm” button. They will ASSUME that the person is okay, because that is what those other twenty mutual friends did.

So do you see now how that works? Do you see how porn scammers and other tricksters can widen their circle of friends due to your own haste, foolishness and gullibility? They can gain hundreds or even thousands of friends, and spread their filthy porn invitations everywhere.

On a final note, whenever I do come across one of these bogus Facebook accounts with the “See my nude photos” link on the page, if I look over at their current friends’ photos on the left side of the page, almost without fail, I will see one of my current friends listed there. In other words, the way in which the scammer found me in the first place, was by tricking someone else into accepting their friend request, and then finding my name in that person’s friends list, exactly as I explained to you earlier.

One way in which you can mitigate this problem is by doing the following:

1. Go to your settings on your Facebook timeline.

2. Click on the “Privacy” link on the left side of the page.

3. Under the “Privacy Settings and Tools” section of the page, go down to the “How People Find and Contact You” section.

4. One of the questions there will be “Who can see your friends list?”.

5. Click on the “Edit” button and change it to “Only Me”, if it is not already set to that.

By taking the above steps, only you will be able to see your full friends list. All of your other friends will only see your mutual friends. In other words, only friends that you both have in common. This is one way to prevent scammers from harvesting your friends list.

For additional information, please check out the following link as well:

https://www.billkochman.com/Blog/do-you-vet-potential-facebook-friends/

I hope you have learned something by reading the above commentary. 🙂