Friend or Foe ?
It is nice to have a lot of friends which is why many people collect them on Facebook. We interact with anyone and everyone! Meet someone once at the grocery store - Boom - Facebook friend. In our society we have varying degrees of friendship; best friends, casual friends, casual acquaintances and so on. Facebook, however, doesn’t differentiate. Many people that love social media collect friends promiscuously. Anyone with even a tenuous link is friended and herein lies the danger. It has been established (and I have chatted about this in previous articles) that there are literally millions of fake Facebook profiles created for a variety of reasons. These include at worst romance scams (one of the most popular and prolific scams today) to at best mischievous pranks. People seem to equate online popularity with actual popularity and so feel the more friends the better. Normally, when deciding whether to accept a friend request, we look to see how many mutual friends we have and if it is more than one or two we accept the friendship even if we don’t really know the person. The trouble is that it takes only one or two of our friends to accept a stranger (which amazingly many people do) to fool us into believing that this is an actual mutual friend. Once the con artist has access to your profile and your friend list (which is just as valuable) they can tailor make a range of scams just for you and your friends using your and their personal information. These scams might include the romance scam, the Microsoft technician scam, the dead maid scam and so many more.
A further danger is that when we have too many friends we often accept a friendship from a cloned account. With hundreds and often thousands of friends, it is almost impossible to keep track of who we have friended and certainly very few people check their friendship lists regularly. Often when considering a friendship request from someone who we know we have already friended we automatically assume they have rebooted their profile or are starting again. If we challenge the new profile via private message, the response is almost always, “Yes, I’m starting again because my old account got hacked!” This is generally nonsense. Facebook accounts do not get hacked – it is the account owner’s gullibility in falling for click bait or phishing scams that allow scammers access to our profiles. The scammers then put filthy pictures on our groups and friends home pages and as a defense mechanism the blame is always, “my account got hacked!”
Scam artists clone high profile accounts in order to commit fraud. One very basic scam example is to send a private message to employees from a cloned account of a top executive. The message suggests a donation drive to a worthy cause, such as Save the Rhino. Employees eager to please will often donate into the scammers account and proudly display their intention or donation on the fake profile. The actual executive is none the wiser because the account is cloned in detail down to the photos, and a large friendship base diverts suspicion.
So what can we do to prevent these kind of scams? Firstly, eliminate the idea that huge friendship groups are a sign of popularity. Strive for quality of friends rather than quantity. Never friend anyone you don’t actually know despite the number of mutual friends you might have in common. Cull your lists regularly. Anthropologists suggest that 150 friendships are the maximum we can sustain without emotional overload. However, consider that out of those 150 friends, only 4 can be relied on in an emotional crisis and only about 14 will express sympathy or react regularly to your posts. Finally, get the message out to your friends to exercise caution with accepting friendship requests and if your warnings are not heeded, you automatically know who to cull first. You don’t need friends that put your personal information at risk. Remember that if even one of your friends is unknowingly friends with a scam artist, that criminal has access to YOUR profile. Finally learn how to protect your social media pages by tweaking your privacy settings. Watching this video is an excellent start : https://youtu.be/LIZYvuhyf8U.
Take care and enjoy social media responsibly and safely.
